African Historiography Research Articles

The geopolitics of South African cities: States, citizens, territory

Much of the research concerning the stark spatiality of South African cities has focused upon the empirical history of segregation and apartheid. this paper offers a theoretical interpretation of the historical meaning of the racially segregated residential spaces that have made up South Africa's urban areas and then considers their changing significance within the transitional post-apartheid urban order. The focus is specifically on the state and the reasons why the racial organization of space was crucial to the exercise of apartheid state power and how this heritage of racial segretation is shaping post-apartheid local government. Exploring the work of michel foucault and making use of an expanded concept of citizenship, I argue that the spatial arrangement of (in this case) african residential areas, and of the form of the apartheid city, was crucially related to the exercise of state power and to the domination of subjects excluded from democratic citizenship rights. Like citizens elsewhere, african people in South Africa's urban areas were bound up in the surveillance networks of the state. These networks operated effectively, i argue, because of the spatial organization of both state apparatuses and residential environments. while much of south african historiography is blind to the importance of spatiality in the construction of state power, this paper makes a strong case that the survival of the apartheid state was centrally dependent upon the geographies that it created. And far from erasing the significance of these racialized spaces, the present transition to democracy has witnessed the emergence of a power-sharing arrangement in local government which has ensured the continued political significance of urban racial segregation. In addition, the relationships between the state, citizenship and space are shown to be as important in the emerging post-apartheid city as they were under apartheid—albeit in a quite different form.

RECENT TRENDS African History From Earliest Times to Independence. By PHILIP CURTIN, STEVEN FEIERMAN, LEONARD THOMPSON and JAN VANSINA. Second edition. London and New York: Longman Group, 1995. Pp. xvi + 546. £25 (ISBN 0-582-050707).

A revised version of this well-known university textbook provides an opportunity to review some of the tendencies in African historiography since the publication of the original version in 1978 which marked ‘the coming of age of African history’ after 25 years of research. This new version is intended to reflect ‘a new level of maturity’ in African historiography with the publication of all the 16 volumes of the Cambridge History of Africa and the Unesco General History of Africa, of which only a few had appeared by 1978. The text has been ‘reworked, updated and expanded’; the book has been redesigned and reset, and the maps have been redrawn and new ones added.

“Fallacious Mirrors:” Colonial Anxiety and Images of African Labor in Mozambique, ca. 1929

African historiography has over the past decade begun to pay increasing attention to photographs as a source for African history. A growing body of work has raised a number of methodological and theoretical questions about how scholars can and should work with images. From their experience with written documents, historians are aware of the ideologically charged conditions under which colonial knowledge was produced. This awareness has armed scholars with a skepticism to look beyond the image itself and examine the physical and technological environment in which photographers worked. Posed studio shots that create “natural” settings and post-event retouching are only some of the practices photographers used to endow their images with a greater semblance of accuracy.Andrew Roberts and David Killingray's “outline” of photography in Africa charts the development of photographic techniques and how their use created specific kinds of images of Africa; Virginia-Lee Webb emphasizes photographers' manipulation of not only their subjects, but also the environment in which they were photographed. What this work has produced is an oft-spoken axiom that photographic images of Africa (or any other place) ought not be taken at face value. This axiom has guided a significant amount of scholarship, although Beatrix Heintze wisely cautions against overinterpretation.Scholars who work with written documentary evidence from the colonial period have well established the ways in which administrators, missionaries, and other Europeans represented Africans as an “other,” as they sought to create cultural and social distance between themselves and Africans. Still other scholars have combined written and oral materials to show how Africans established their own identities and interpreted colonial discourses to create alternative, liberating discursive spaces.

African Historiography: Essays in Honour of Jacob Ade Ajayi

This is a tribute to Jacob Ade Ajayi, examining the four main areas he has addressed during his career: the importance of oral tradition as a historical source, Yoruba and West African studies, missionaries, and the historian's approach to the subject, focusing on the Ibadan school.

Aspekte van ’n Christelike perspektief op fasette van die Geskiedwetenskap en die beoefening daarvan in ’n veranderende Suid-Afrika

Aspects of a Christian perspective on some facets of History as a discipline and its practice in a changing South Africa Within the framework and dynamics of a currently changing South Africa, not only History as a practised discipline hul historians too - especially Christian historians are increasingly criticised from various quarters and/or faced with totally new obstacles and questions. Although criticism in this sense constitutes nothing new perse, the f undamental character of changes sweeping the country (e.g. democratization, nation building, truth and reconciliation, societal restructuring) and the historio-political legacy of the recent past, re-accentuated the criticism that South African historiography has consistently proved to be subservient of a political ideology. The objectives of this article are to highlight some former historical trends and current tendencies in Christian perspectives of the past and to discuss the question of how Christian historians and Christian History teachers can interact in a responsible and careful way with their subject by avoiding misrepresenting the truth and of becoming (again?) the servants of just another ideology.

Not Quite Venus from the Waves: The Almoravid Conquest of Ghana in the Modern Historiography of Western Africa

The Almoravid conquest of ancient Ghana in 1076 AD is certainly among the most dramatic and controversial single events in the historiography of West Africa. It has been regarded as a crucial turning point, as the battle of Hastings was for England, not only for the existence of Ghana, but also for the destiny of the entire area, opening the gates to a triumphant Islam in sub-Saharan Africa.Yet the conquest and destruction of Ghana by Almoravid invaders constitute one of the myths which still populate African historiography, like the wonderful voyage of Hanno to the Bight of Biafra, which was carried over from classical Greco-Roman texts into modern European literature as early as 1533. Since then the story of Hanno has been used for various purposes by western Africanists, for instance, to explain the diffusion of iron technology into sub-Saharan Africa. Just the same, no definite evidence has yet been found for any Carthaginian sailings along the West African coast, except the Periplus of Hanno itself, which seems to be a literary composition drawn from earlier classical sources. A reason for the popularity of Hanno, and other such stories in African historiography, has been that many modern writers have been content with using the previous secondary literature, instead of examining carefully all the available primary sources. Consequently, many subjective and hypothetical assumptions created by previous scholars, working on the basis of even less evidence, have been transferred bodily from one corpus of research to the next. Finally, their origin forgotten, stories like the voyage of Hanno have become established historical facts through constant repetition in the authorized literature.

The limit of historical knowledge: The subaltern and South African historiography

The limit of historical knowledge: The subaltern and South African historiography

Black Ethnicities, Communities and Political Expression in Late Victorian Cape Town

In 1994 the National Party of Mr de Klerk defeated the African National Congress in only one of nine South African provinces, the Western Cape. The reason for this success lay in the support that the NP received from a large majority of Coloured South Africans in this region. Many were worried about the possibility of losing homes and jobs to ‘Africans’, and believed that the ANC was a specifically African party. These worries and beliefs were encouraged by Nationalist Party politicians. But the success of the latter's campaign was premised on the existence of more enduring self-identities, while simultaneously lending them new content.This article attempts to explain the emergence of different black ethnicities, and particularly the emergence of Coloured ethnicity, in the British Cape Colony, and its capital, Cape Town. Because of a low non-racial franchise and (theoretical) equality of all before the law, the Victorian Cape provided the possibility of formal black political expression – the establishment of parties, electioneering and political mobilization.The different black ethnicities that emerged were not the inevitable result of different ‘cultures’ or distant historical experiences. But nor were they simply created by élite Ethnic mobilizers in response to white racialization and discrimination, as was sometimes suggested in revisionist South African historiography of the Apartheid era. This historiography was understandably eager to challenge belief in the immutability of race and ethnicity that underpinned ‘separate development’ – a policy which itself served to reshape, perpetuate and reinforce perceptions of ethnic difference.Labels, like ‘Coloured’ or ‘Native’ may have been imposed by whites and used by black élites to challenge state policies or to demand resources. But the labels had to continue to make sense to those they wished to mobilize. The content of ethnicities could not be purely ‘imagined’ by élites.

South African urban history, racial segregation and the unique case of Cape Town?

Cape Town has enjoyed an academic and popular reputation for being the most relaxed of South African cities in terms of ‘race’ relations. Part of this reputation is based on the belief that there was much less segregation in Cape Town than elsewhere in southern Africa before Apartheid. This article reviews this contention. Attention is drawn to the extent of segregation that did exist in the city by the early twentieth century. In particular, an explanation is offered for its non‐residential forms, a hitherto neglected exercise in South African urban historiography. But the limits of segregation in Cape Town, the features that have contributed to its reputation for uniqueness, are also examined and explained. These include the existence of considerable ‘miscegenation’, an enduring non‐racial political tradition and the fact that social segregation was far from comprehensive. The task of explaining these occurrences necessarily involves exploring Cape Town as a place, and thus needs to be a work of urban history. Using Paul Maylam ‘s terminology, it needs to be a ‘history‐of‐the city’, not just the ‘history'‐in‐the city’ that has been the dominant form in South African historiography.

New Nation, New History: The History Workshop in South Africa, 1977-1994

To appraise the influence of the History Workshop (based at the University of the Witwatersrand inJohannesburg, South Africa) both on the study of history in South Africa and on popular understandings of the past is a hazardous and perhaps foolhardy venture. Most historians of the subcontinent would agree that a revolution occurred in the writing of the history of South Africa in the later 1970s and 1980s, but to isolate the role of the History Workshop from other local and international influences is difficult and almost certainly controversial. Assessing the impact of the History Workshop on popular perceptions of history is even more problematical, through want of data or ways to measure it. All that will be attempted here is to indicate what parts of the wider public the History Workshop has succeeded in reaching, since the popularization of South African history is so centrally a part of the History Workshop project that even the strictly academic side of its activities cannot be understood in isolation from it. The History Workshop was founded in 1977 by a group of academics drawn from the social sciences and the humanities at the University of the Witwatersrand. The date was not without significance; both the discipline of history and the wider society in South Africa were then in turmoil. Since the late 1960s, and more particularly the early 1970s, a radical critique of liberal and conservative South African historiography had been underway. Spearheaded by South African scholars based at university centers in England, this radical critique had been making a growing impact on younger academics and undergraduates in South Africa. Outside the universities, South Africa in general, and the Witwatersrand in particular, had been convulsed by student insurrection in Soweto, which began on June 16, 1976, and rumbled through the first half of 1977.1 One consequence of the insurrection was that the parents and teachers of Soweto students who either were boycotting school or had been expelled began to seek an alternative education. Classes by academics and teachers from the University of the

In/articulation: Polysystem theory, postcolonial discourse theory, and South African literary historiography

(1993). In/articulation: Polysystem theory, postcolonial discourse theory, and South African literary historiography. Current Writing: Text and Reception in Southern Africa: Vol. 5, No. 2, pp. 25-43.

Oral Traditions as Historical Sources in Ethiopia: The Case of the Beta Israel (Falasha)

It is axiomatic that historians should use all available sources. African historiography has been on the cutting edge of methodological innovation for the last three decades, utilizing written sources, oral traditions, archeology, linguistics, ethnography, musicology, botany, and other techniques to bring respect and maturity to the field.But the use of such a diverse methodology has brought controversy as well, particularly regarding oral traditions. Substantial criticisms have been raised concerning the problems of chronology and limited time depth, variations in different versions of the same events, and the problem of feedback between oral and written sources. A “structuralist” critique deriving from Claude Levi-Strauss's study of Amerindian mythology has provided a useful corrective to an overly-literal acceptance of oral traditions, but often went too far in throwing out the historical baby with the mythological bathwater, leading some historians to reject totally the use of oral data. A more balanced view has shown that a modified structural approach can be a useful tool in historical analysis. In Ethiopian historiography some preliminary speculations were made along structuralist lines,5 although in another sense such an approach was always implicit since the analysis of Ethiopie written hagiographies and royal chronicles required an awareness of the mythological or folk elements they contain.Two more difficult problems to overcome have been the Ethiopie written documents' centrist and elitist focus on the royal monarchy and Orthodox church. The old Western view that “history” required the existence of written documents and a state led to the paradigm of Ethiopia as an “outpost of Semitic civilization” and its historical and historiographical separation from the rest of Africa. The comparatively plentiful corpus of written documentation for Ethiopian history allowed such an approach, and the thousands of manuscripts made available to scholars on microfilm in the last fifteen years have demonstrated the wealth still to be found in written sources. However, such sources, although a starting point for research on Ethiopian history, no longer seem adequate in themselves because they focus primarily on political-military and religious events concerning the monarchy and church.

Unesco and African Historiography

Unesco's General History of Africa (henceforth GHA) is now nearing completion—seven out of the eight volumes having been published in English, at least—and the time is ripe to draw attention to its role in the historiography of African history, a role very different from that played by the Cambridge History of Africa with which it is often compared. In certain ways the Unesco project has been a unique venture, and not just in African history but, in general, because it broke with old established practice. The work was not guided by one or two editors but by a large committee. History-writing by committee seemed not only distasteful but impossible to achieve to many, both because of the practical difficulties involved and because it seemed incredible that so many editors could agree on a common text, without falling into sheer banality. Now that the volumes are out, readers can judge for themselves. Many among them actually wonder how exactly these volumes and chapters were created. Because I have been an active member of the committee since its creation in 1971 and of its bureau since 1983, I can provide a general answer to this question. But the time has also come to draw attention to the records generated by this project. Future researchers will find a huge mass of papers involving hundreds of historians of Africa that touch on practically all aspects of Africa's historiography between ca. 1965 and today.

African historiography: New myths for old

African historiography: New myths for old

Class and culture in the workplace: East London, industrialisation, and the conflict over work, 1945–1957

This paper attempts, through a closer examination of early industrialisation in East London, to re‐assess notions of ‘cheap native labour’ and its impact on class and culture in the workplaces of the city in the 1940s and 1950s. In particular, it seeks to amplify concerns of the dynamic complexity of working‐class formation in this period, and suggests the need to historicize, and problematise these processes beyond more typically represented understandings in South African historiography. The paper is divided into four main sections, and moves from a general economic overview of the city in the period, through conflicts and contradictions existant within employers, and racially divided white workers, to a closer examination of the impacts on, and shaping capacities of, black workers out of the domains of work and migrancy. It is argued this changing ‘material experience’ was central to redrawing economic structures, and shaping worker identities in historically and regionally specific ways, and concludes...

Reflections on an African Experience

Professor Roland Oliver is regarded as one of the leading pioneers of African history. For forty years, he taught African history and supervised many research students at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. He organized many seminars and international conferences where African historiography was discussed. Along with J. D. Fage he was founding editor of The J7ournal of African History. In I962, also in collaboration with J. D. Fage, he produced A Short History of Africa, which covered more or less the same time span as the present book (except that the latter also covers the post-colonial period). And before he retired, he was General Editor (again with Fage) of The Cambridge History of Africa. He has now distilled all this experience into what he terms 'a work of reflection, written for sheer pleasure during the first four years of my retirement from the first Chair of African history ever created in the University of London'. In less than three hundred pages of lucid and readable prose, he has covered the history of continental Africa from the emergence of hominids about five million years ago to the release of Nelson Mandela in I990. He has achieved this by concentrating on what he regards as significant themes, each of which has been treated chronologically. The themes discussed in the book include human origins, the origins of food production, historical linguistics, the civilization of Ancient Egypt, the spread of Judaism, Christianity and Islam to Africa, slavery and the slave trade, the caravan trade of pre-colonial Africa, African political systems and urbanization, the colonization of Africa and the experience of postcolonial Africa. The first two chapters deal with the story of early man, which is derived mainly from archaeological and palaeontological evidence. It starts with hominid evolution, which he traces back to the earliest known remains of an omnivorous, bipedal creature called Australopithecus, dating back some four million years in Africa, to modern Homo Sapiens sapiens which emerged only within the last 40,000 years. Oliver is at his best in these chapters, in which he has digested extremely complex concepts to present a readable, exciting and insightful narrative, free from the usual dry jargon of the archaeologist. There are, however, two shortcomings. First, Oliver paints a linear picture of human evolution, with one stage leading inevitably to another, where many writers now see a more complex mosaic. Secondly, his story begins with the Australopithecus for no apparent reason. We know that the period prior to four million years ago represents an important gap in the fossil record. Should the uniquely human hominid line, for example, be extended back into the late Miocene epoch (about 8-9 million years ago)? What happened to Ramapithecus (I4 million years ago)? Did his line continue to join that of Australopithecus? Oliver next deals with the Stone.-Age, during which hunting and gathering was the universal mode of human subsistence until the domestication of plants and animals some I2,000 to I5,000 years ago. These virile Stone-Age peoples are the

Irish settlement and identity in South Africa before 1910

Although there has been a continuous Irish presence at the Cape of Good Hope since the late eighteenth century, the chroniclers of the Irish diaspora have until the late 1980s ignored the continent of Africa. This was in part because relatively few Irish migrants ventured to Africa, but it is also the consequence of two other factors. The vast majority of Irish immigrants to Africa in the nineteenth century went to South Africa, a region which, with some exceptions, has been academically isolated for a generation. Then within South Africa there is much still to be learnt about the nature of English-speaking society in the region. While the meticulous analysis of black and Afrikaner history and society, and of related economic history, has dominated South African historiography for some two decades, professional academics have too often left the field of South African English-speaking studies to the amateur historian and the antiquarian. Thus what in Canada or Australia would be regarded as mainline historical research has in South Africa been sidelined in the name of historical relevancy. In fact an analysis of Irish settlement in southern Africa fills an important gap in the general survey of Irish emigration to the empire and reveals a pattern of Irish settlement very different from other regions of Irish migration.

Political and collective violence in Southern African historiography

(1992). Political and collective violence in Southern African historiography. Journal of Southern African Studies: Vol. 18, Political Violence in Southern Africa, pp. 455-486.

The Afrocentric Perspective in African Journalism

More precisely than most, the term Afrocentric depicts the unique worldview of African people and provides historians with a tool for examining the intellectual history of African nationalism. Scholars in other fields (Myers, 1985, 1986; Semmes, 1981; Spira, 1983) developed the philosophy of Afrocentricity and applied it to the study of psychology, religiosity, and rhetoric. Molefi K. Asante (1987) has codified an analytical methodology based on the premise that all analysis is culturally centered and flows from ideological assumptions (p. 189) and that human actions cannot be understood apart from the emotions, attitudes, and cultural definitions of a given context (p. 164). Asante observed that African people have developed their own perspective of history and culture, distinct from the perspectives of other people. But the interpretation of African historical data has been mainly written from a Eurocentric perspective, with the result being intellectual conflict based on wrong premises. This author maintains that the Eurocentric perspective of African history has seriously distorted the analysis of the African past and has negatively affected modem African historiography. African intellectuals, including African nationalists, have been torn by the dual perspectives they developed in their formative years as products of their own cultures and of the European education system that gave them access to such institutions as the newspapers and to

"Hewers of Wood, Carriers of Water": Islam, Class, and Politics on the Eve of Ghana's Independence

The publication of Michael Crowder's “Whose Dream Was It Anyway?” in January 1987 marked the opening of what promises to be a challenging era of revision and re-evaluation in African historiography. With the benefit of three decades of historical hindsight and armed with recently declassified colonial documentation, historians are beginning to grapple with the complexities of national struggle in late colonial society, beginning with Ghana's march to freedom in 1957. It is as a part of this process of revision and re-evaluation that the following examination of the Muslim Association Party [MAP] of the Gold Coast is offered. The MAP was a comparatively small organization which was and is easily overshadowed by the turbulence of mass nationalist politics in the years 1950 thru 1957. Yet its unique blend of religious, class, and ethnic appeals—appeals too often misunderstood or dismissed outright as vestiges of tribalism, traditionalism, or religious fanaticism—reveals much about the antinomies of nationalist struggle in the Gold Coast. Political scientists concerned with the dynamic rise of Gold Coast nationalism in the decade after World War II (and those few historians who dared venture into the recent past) focused primarily on Kwame Nkrumah's Convention People's Party [CPP], its early split from the United Gold Coast Convention [UGCC] and its ultimate domination of nationalist politics from 1951 to 1957 (Apter, 1955; Austin, 1964; Bourret, 1960; Bretton, 1966; Fitch and Oppenheimer, 1968).