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Reflections on the Genesis of Anglophone African History After World War II

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 May 2014

J. D. Fage
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Extract

It is forty-five years ago since Roland Oliver was appointed to a lectureship in the “Tribal History of East Africa” at London University's School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS). This was certainly the first appointment in African history in a university in the United Kingdom, and very likely the first such in a university anywhere in the world. In 1986 he retired from the Chair of African History, to which the University had advanced him in 1963 (an event which may very well have been another first), and he spent the first years of his retirement writing his book The African Experience: Major Themes in African History From Earliest Times to the Present.

It was entirely appropriate that the International Journal of African Historical Studies should have asked Jan Vansina to review this book, for his activities in the field of African history go back almost as far as Oliver's; forty-one years have now passed since Vansina began his academic career as a researcher at the Institut pour la Recherche Scientifique en Afrique Centrale (sc. the then Belgian territories in Africa). The review article which Vansina has written begins by paying generous tribute to Oliver's pioneer achievements as a leading actor in virtually every activity needed for the understanding and the furtherance of African history—researcher, teacher, author, editor, and organizer. His first general conclusion (393) on The African Experience is that Oliver's book “lives up to its promise” as “‘a work of reflection’ on the substance of African history, the distillation of his experience of forty (sic) years.”

Type
Research Article
Information
History in Africa , Volume 20 , 1993 , pp. 15 - 26
Copyright
Copyright © African Studies Association 1993

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References

Notes

1. (London, 1991).

2. IJAHS 25 (1992), 391–98.Google Scholar

3. (Madison, 1990).

4. First published in The Listener (28 November 1963), 871Google Scholar (emphasis mine). Trevor-Roper, of course, quoted Voltaire as an early exponent of his line of argument; others have looked to Hegel. But the outlook it expresses surely goes back at least as far as ancient Greece and Rome, and the idea that the peoples beyond the limes are barbarians.

5. Two recent contributions which have caught my eye, and which seem especially relevant to the particular direction of the debate taken by Vansina, are Fuglestad, Finn, “The Trevor-Roper Trap, or the Imperialism of History: an Essay,” HA 19 (1992), 309–26Google Scholar, and McCaskie, T.C., “Empire State: Asante and the Historians,” JAH 33 (1992), 467–76.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

6. Review of Sharpe's, KevinThe Personal Rule of Charles I, The Observer, 27 December 1992.Google Scholar

7. By the time a version of this Ph.D. thesis was published as The Missionary Factor in East Africa (London, 1952)Google Scholar, Oliver had been appointed to his East African tribal history post at SOAS and had had the experience of twelve months' intensive field work, so perhaps it ended up as rather more a work of African history and rather less of ecclesiastical history.

8. Douglas Jones had published relatively little before his premature death in 1979, but he had an important and a considerable formative influence as a teacher, especially as a supervisor of research students. See his obituary, HA 7 (1980).

9. Here I must most gratefully acknowledge help received from, among others, Professors John Hargreaves (whose student days were at Manchester), Richard Gray (Cambridge, then SOAS), Kenneth Ingham (Oxford), Terence Ranger (Oxford), and Neville Sanderson (Oxford), and Christopher Fyfe (Reader in African History at Edinburgh). I am of course uniquely responsible for the use I have made of the information which they gave me.

10. My first acquaintance with postgraduate seminars was in 1954, when I spent a term of study leave at Sir Keith Hancock's Institute of Commonwealth Studies at the University of London, which I remember as the meeting place for both Gerald Graham's Imperial History seminar and Roland Oliver's African History seminar (which I think had been started in the previous year).

11. J. A. Gallagher was Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, 1948-63, and then successively Oxford's Beit Professor of the History of the British Commonwealth (1963-71) and Cambridge's Vere Harmsworth Professor of Imperial and Naval History (1971-80). R. E. Robinson was Fellow of St. John's College, Cambridge, from 1949 and then succeeded Gallagher as Beit Professor at Oxford.

12. Dame Lillian, Professor of History at Bedford College, who had written about the British West Indies, was Vice-Chancellor of the University of London from 1948 to 1951; Harlow was Rhodes Professor of Imperial History at London University from 1938 to 1948, and then returned to Oxford to succeed Coupland in the Beit Chair of the History of the British Commonwealth; Professor Hancock became Director of London's Institute of Commonwealth Studies in 1949 after holding chairs of history at Adelaide, Birmingham, and Oxford.

13. Coupland was Beit Professor at Oxford, 1920-48; Dame Margery Perham was Fellow of Nuffied College, 1939-63, and Reader in Colonial Administration, 1939-48; Simmons was Beit Lecturer in the History of the British Empire at Oxford, 1943-47, and then Professor of History at the University of Leicester; Madden succeeded Simmons as Beit Lecturer.

14. E. A. Benians was Master of St John's College, 1933-52, and one of the General Editors of The Cambridge History of the British Empire (8 vols.: Cambridge, 1929–1959).Google Scholar Eric Walker had spent 1911-36 as Professor of History in the University of Cape Town, then came to Cambridge as its Vere Harmsworth Professor of Imperial and Naval History.

15. In the 1950s other Nigerians who achieved eminence as historians followed Dike to London and doctoral supervision by Graham or other imperial historians, e.g., the future Profs. Aderibigbe, Anene, Ayandele, and Ifemesia. But I do not think that any other anglophone African country was so imperially minded when training its historians.

16. However, at the same time one of Boahen's Ghanaian contemporaries was sent to research on African history in the imperial fastness of Oxford.

17. Curtin's, The Two Jamaicas (Cambridge, Mass., 1955)Google Scholar originated in a Harvard Ph.D. thesis supervised by Professor David Owen. When in 1957 a visiting professorship was instituted at Madison in honor of Paul Knaplund, Curtin tried to get Dike to come to it. Dike's commitments prevented this, and I was asked to come in his place. In 1960 Vansina was invited to join Curtin as a member of the Madison faculty, and became its senior Africanist historian when Curtin moved to Johns Hopkins University in 1975.

18. Later on in this piece I stress the importance of the historical evidence available in what may be called “classical Africana.” But by and large such works were not immediately suitable for general student use, but only for “special subjects” to be studied by final year history undergraduates.

19. Hancock's section on the settlers' frontier in southern Africa was just as percipient, but this subject was of its nature more colonial.

20. Theal, G. McCall, ed., Records of South-Eastern Africa (9 vols.: Cape Town, 1898–1903).Google Scholar But note also the few, but important, documents in an appendix to Axelson, Eric, South-East Africa, 1488-1530 (London, 1940).Google Scholar

21. For example, F. W. T. Posselt's articles in NADA in the 1920s and 1930s, and Bullock, Charles, The Mashona (Cape Town, 1928).Google Scholar

22. Goody was then engaged on his fieldwork on the LoWiili in the northern Gold Coast (and was later, of course, Professor of Social Anthropology at Cambridge), and McCall was Professor of Anthropology at Boston University's African Studies Center. David Tait joined the University College of the Gold Coast in 1950 and had already achieved a considerable reputation as a social anthropologist by the time that he was killed in a motor accident six years later; see his posthumous The Konkomba of Northern Ghana (London, 1961).Google Scholar

23. There is little obvious memorial of this except a little article in the very first number of the Journal of the Historical Society of Nigeria, 1(1956), 15–19Google Scholar, and a short piece I contributed on the early history of the Mossi-Dagomba kingdoms to The Historian in Tropical Africa, ed. Jan Vansina, , Mauny, Raymond, and Thomas, L.V. (London, 1964).Google Scholar

24. This is evident throughout Jan Vansina's many published works, but in particular one must cite his De la tradition orale (Tervuren, 1961)Google Scholar, and Oral Tradition as History (Madison, 1985).Google Scholar

25. (London, 1977).

26. Vansina's training in anthropology, like David Tait's, was at University College, London, under Professor Daryll Forde, who in the 1940s and 1950s was perhaps the most ahistorical of Britain's leading social anthropologists. But, as may be seen from his sponsorship (as Director of the International African Institute) of The Historian in Tropical Africa and the later collection, West African Kingdoms in the Nineteenth Century (London, 1967)Google Scholar, which he and Phyllis Kaberry edited, he was later more sympathetic to historical research in Africa.

27. My 1973 Raymond Dart Lecture bore the title States and Subjects in Sub-Saharan African History (Johannesburg, 1974)Google Scholar, while much more recently I used the title “States and Social Cohesion in Black Africa” for a piece which I contributed to Black Africa in Time Perspective, edited by Hair, P. E. H. (Liverpool, 1990).Google Scholar

28. See, for example, Southall, Aidan, “Stateless Society,” International Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences 16, 157–68.Google Scholar

29. The example that immediately comes to mind is the fascinating chapter, “The Living Tradition,” by Ba, A. Hampaté, UNESCO General History of Africa (Berkeley, 1981), 1, 166–203.Google Scholar (But maybe Hampate Ba was more resistant to European culture than untainted by it.)

30. Fuglestad, “Trevor-Roper Trap.”