In October 1986, in conjunction with the annual meeting of the African Studies Association, a series of panels was convened to commemorate the founding of the African Studies Program at the University of Wisconsin twenty-five years previously. By many criteria this had been a successful program in promoting African studies as an academic field in the United States, in part because from the earliest years the program had looked to the future development of the discipline. It was fitting, therefore, that this “commemoration” not simply be an exercise in recalling the “glorious past” but instead be given to reviewing the development of the field over that period, and to looking ahead to likely trends in the academic understanding of Africa in the coming years.

The articles included in this symposium were first presented at panels organized as part of this commemoration. As befitting the occasion, they were intended to be reflective rather than critical, exploratory rather than definitive, ranging freely over the themes and features that have characterized the study of African history at the University of Wisconsin over that period. But it was also felt that despite the occasion that engendered them, these papers all had the potential of a wider audience, in part because they addressed issues characteristic of African historical studies in this country in general, with both their strengths and drawbacks.

These papers were presented at two panels of very different orientation, and that organization has been maintained here. One category, consisting of articles by Ewald, Spear, and Harms, dealt with “The Craft of the Historian.” These papers examined three related dimensions to historical inquiry in Africa: historians' relations to their sources, the analytic skills needed to assess the data, and the conceptual issues involved in historical understanding. Another panel dealt with the theme “Future Trends and Perspectives in African History.” This set of papers addressed the recent development of certain fields of inquiry and projected the likely trends of such studies over the coming years.

Fieldwork fascinates us, at least those of us who have done fieldwork. Whenever two or more fieldworkers gather, they begin to exchange fieldwork stories. But as those of us who have worked with oral narratives know, people tell stories for reasons. Our stories are more than “just stories.” By telling stories, we try to come to terms with an experience and to convey to others what it was like. Why do memories of fieldwork preoccupy fieldworkers so? If fieldwork stories belong to a genre, they are bildungsroman. Fieldwork allowed fieldworkers to reexperience the intense education of childhood, but with an adult consciousness. They entered the field as children and were educated by the people with whom they lived. Even the most basic skills that our parents taught us when were toddlers — eating and personal hygiene — had to be relearned in the field. The education of fieldwork is such a powerful experience because it is a total experience: physical, social, and cognitive. Here I address the cognitive or intellectual aspect of fieldwork. But, even as I focus on fieldwork as an intellectual experience, I must note that the cognitions acquired during the fieldwork take on special power because they derive energy from those physical and social experiences.

The dichotomy between the hedgehog and the fox lies at the core of this essay. Isaiah Berlin translates the Greek poet Archilocus: “the fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing” (Berlin, 1978: 22). The fieldworker's knowledge is the knowledge of the fox. Berlin elaborates: “There exists a great chasm between those who relate everything to a single central vision” — the hedgehogs — and those whose “thought moves on many levels,” who “seize upon a vast variety of experience” without seeking to fit it into any “unitary inner vision” (Berlin, 1978: 22). This is the fox's perspective, and it is this perspective that gives fieldwork its value and its future.

In the preceding essay Janet Ewald has rightly stressed the critical importance of field work in revealing the manifold relations among different factors, institutions, and events in the past as well as those between the past and the present. She has also noted the disparate, eclectic, and even anarchic nature of the data obtained, making interpretation and analysis of the data a second, a perhaps even more difficult, hurdle that African historians must face between overcoming the confusions and complexities of field work and confronting the third hurdle of historical analysis. Having collected the evidence, then, our task shifts to its interpretation.

African history has been called the decathalon of the social sciences as we sought to employ seemingly complementary methodologies, data, and theoretical perspectives of history, archaeology, comparative linguistics, anthropology, ethnography, and oral traditions to overcome the limited amount of documentary material available to us. The move was an audacious assault on disciplinary boundaries, but one that sometimes resulted in naive uses of data and analysis without proper consideration of the complexities of other fields. Wars between historians and anthropologists have been endemic. But we have all become more sophisticated in our use of other disciplinary perspectives in the process, so that today we see emerging both an increasingly sensitive anthropological history as well as a more subtle historical anthropology.

John Maynard Keynes (1936: 383) once wrote that “practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist.” We historians are practical people who pride ourselves on our attention to facts and our painstaking reconstruction of detail. And yet our criteria for deciding which data are relevant, our categories for arranging data, and our approach to interpreting data are often influenced by models drawn from the social sciences. The social sciences, in turn, have borrowed many of their models from the natural sciences. And models in the natural sciences, it turns out, are often based on analogies to machines. Like the practical men referred to by Keynes, we often apply these models in an intuitive, almost unconscious, fashion, but they are no less influential for being unacknowledged. The twenty-fifth anniversary of the Wisconsin African Studies Program provides us with an opportunity to pause and look at some of the models that have influenced us.

This is an essay offering some random thoughts on the progress that has been made on research in African history since the early 1960s and what the writer sees as the research tasks that must still be addressed in future. In this introductory portion, a number of general issues are raised about the current state of the craft. It is a section in which the ground is cleared, as it were, for the main task of the paper which is dealt with in the subsequent three sections. There, an attempt will be made to come to grips with the most topical findings of the research that has gone on, and to point out the gaps that have yet to be filled, in the main sub-disciplines of political, economic, and social history. The examples used to illustrate the argument have been largely drawn from east, central, and southern Africa, this being the part of the continent with whose history the writer is most familiar. Furthermore, being neither original nor empirically based, this essay is essentially a review of work others have done on various facets of African history. While assessing that work, it should nonetheless also serve as a pointer to areas of investigation that seem not to have received adequate attention, areas to which effort might well be directed in future.

It should be noted, to begin with, that historians of Africa have been extremely good at asking new questions of their discipline and its sources. The result is that African historiography has been characterized by different traditions of historical inquiry and knowledge (Zeleza, 1983:9-42). In other words, in a bid to enhance our conceptual understanding of past African experience, historians have had recourse to one paradigm or framework of analysis or another, to the extent of making possibilities seem endless. All this has been generally viewed as a healthy development, but it is one which poses a serious challenge to one called upon to identify and offer informed opinion on the research tasks to which future attention should be directed.

The World Bank, in its controversial 1981 report on problems of African development, came down particularly hard on African governments for having inflated the state sector (World Bank, 1981: 40):

The Berg report, as it is known after its principal author, Elliott Berg, praises African governments for their accomplishments in education and health, but otherwise condemns them for following mistaken, state-centered economic policy. This is not to say, however, that the report praised colonial economic policies by comparison. Here is one of the few paragraphs in the report addressing the era before 1960 (World Bank, 1981: 11):

Let me begin with a caveat: when the topic of this paper was first broached to me by Professor Vansina, I was excited but at a loss as to what exactly it meant or entailed. Not being formally trained in the history of ideas, otherwise known as intellectual history, I wrote back requesting some explanation. Even though this was kindly provided, it did very little to relieve my uneasiness, especially as I recalled H. Stuart Hughes' (1961: 7) caution about writing the history of ideas: “The commonest error of the intellectual historian is to write about things he does not really understand — things he has not ‘internalized’ and thought through for himself.”

Equally disconcerting was the futurity aspect of the topic which, in traditional African terms, would have prompted a visit to the oracle or diviner. For in times of trouble, that is, when an African is confronted with a seemingly insoluble problem, the tendency would be to seek supernatural intervention. But alas, this is America! Thus I am left to rely so.

More seriously, let me emphasize the point that the task at hand is a difficult and ambitious one, at least from a conceptual standpoint. For our purposes, therefore, the approach to the subject is from the “bottom up” instead of from “above,” in marked contrast to the conventional practice in this field. As a result, we have posed some fundamental questions, not for the purpose of producing definitive answers but to use as the framework for our discussion. Accordingly: (1) What, exactly, do we mean by the history of ideas? (2) Whose ideas should we be concerned with? (3) What are the possible sources from which our data will be drawn? (4) What is the scope and objective of this historical exercise?

When I was first asked to write this paper, I was instructed that the whole field of social history was open to my purview and that my efforts should be directed to future accomplishments and not past glories. My first impulse was to wander over to the library and try to determine in fact what social history was in order to bring some boundaries to my paper. After looking through several of the standard reference works on the social sciences and their definitions of social history, I began to feel that I was not the only person unsure of the boundaries between social/political/economic/intellectual/religious history. Furthermore the request to look only into the future and not the past left me feeling out of sorts given my historian's training. Thus, I decided instead to try to examine several of the many areas of the social history of Africa which are largely unworked or need examination in more depth.

The medical history of Africa is an area in which many fruitful and significant opportunities exist for further research. Work in this field has been done in several different countries and the results are beginning to appear in a growing number of books and articles. Yet there are still a great many important topics and geographic areas which remain to be explored. These range from local issues such as the sleeping sickness epidemic which ravaged the Zaire River basin near the turn of the century, to the regional differences of experiences with epidemic disease in early colonial Africa, especially those differences between East and West Africa (Feierman, 1985).