Abstract
In 1992, in a dramatic address to the American Association of African Studies, the pioneering figure in the study of African oral traditions, Jan Vansina, identified what he considered to be a major challenge to African history which, if not met, would condemn African history to mediocrity and irrelevance in Africa itself.1 It consisted of two parts: the wholesale transfer of European concepts into Africa around issues of no concern to Africans and a postmodernist attack on historical methodology. Remarking on the ‘irrelevance’ of Luise White’s study of prostitution in Nairobi when Kenyan historians were involved in heated debate about the Mau-Mau, Vansina also criticised White’s interview techniques and what he termed her’ sample selection’, as well as the sampling done by Belinda Bozzoli in her study, Women of Phokeng. Citing instances of ‘hasty’ and’ shoddy’ work he went on at length about the neglect of methodology. Vansina repeatedly addressed the work of David William Cohen, depicting it too as irrelevant, and as a profoundly foreign mode of inquiry2 that both abandons the existing rules for the interpretation of evidence and eschews the possibility of historical truth. In 1995 an amplified version of Vansina’s address appeared as a review article,’ some Perceptions on the Writing of African History, 1948–1992’3 The piece revealed more of the thinking that lay behind the seemingly gratuitous criticisms voiced at the annual meeting three years earlier.
Thanks are due to Nessa Leibhammer, Verne Harris and Isabel Hofmeyr, who commented on an earlier draft of this essay, as well as to the participants at the International Conference ‘Words and Voices: Critical Practices of Orality in Africa and African Studies’ held in Bellagio, 1997, where this essay was first presented.
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References
My title is adapted from a key phrase in Isabel Hofmeyr’s wonderful study, ‘We Spend Our Years as a Tale that is Told’: Oral Historical Narrative in a South African Chiefdom (Johannesburg: University of the Witwatersrand Press, 1993), p. 54.
Vansina was here echoing Martin Chanock’s comments reproduced as part of the ‘Afterpiece’ appended to D. W. Cohen and E. S. Atieno Odhiambo’s Burying S. M.: The Politics of Knowledge and the Sociology of Power in Africa (Portsmouth NH: Heinemann, 1992).
J. Vansina, ‘Some perceptions on the writing of African history: 1948–1992’, Itinerario (1995), pp. 77–91. See also his ‘Lessons of 40 Years in African History’, International Journal of African Historical Studies 25 (1992).
Vansina, ‘Writing African history’, p. 79.
Ibid.
Ibid., p. 81.
Ibid., p. 87.
Ibid., p. 89.
Ibid., p. 90.
David William Cohen, Womunafu’s Bunafu: A Study of Authority in a Nineteenth-Century African Community (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977).
Ibid., p. 8.
Ibid., p. 9.
J. Vansina, Oral Tradition as History (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985).
A version of this essay was subsequently published in David William Cohen, The Combing of History (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1994).
Cohen, ‘The production of history’, position paper prepared for the Fifth International Roundtable in Anthropology and History, Paris 1986, pp. 25, 64.
Vansina, ‘Writing African history’, pp. 89–90.
D. Henige, ‘Omphaloskepsis and the infantilizing of history’, Journal of African History, 36 (1995).
Cohen, The Combing of History.
Henige, ‘Omphaloskepsis’, p. 316.
Ibid., p. 317.
Ibid.
See also J. Vansina, ‘Comment: traditions of genesis’, Journal of African History, 15 (1974).
R. Harms, J. Miller, D. Newbury and M. Wagner, eds., Paths Towards the Past: African Historical Essays in Honor of Jan Vansina (Atlanta: The African Studies Association Press, 1994), p. 5.
Harms et al., Paths Toward the Past, p. 6.
See for example, R L. Bonner, Kings, Commoners and Concessionaires (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983); J. B. Peires, The House of Phalo (Johannesburg: Ravan, 1981).
David William Cohen’s Historical Traditions of Busoga, published in the vernacular, was path-breaking in this regard.
For a detailed review of these developments, see C. Saunders, The Making of the South African Past: Major Historians on Race and Class (Cape Town and Johannesburg: David Philip, 1988).
B. Bozzoli and P. Delius, ‘Radical history and South African history’ in J. Brown et al., History from South Africa: Alternative Visions and Practices (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1991), p. 21.
B. Bozzoli, ‘Intellectuals, audiences and histories: South African experiences, 1978–88’, in Brown et al., History from South Africa, p. 211.
See Bozzoli’s comments, ‘Intellectuals, audiences’, p. 214; see also S. Jeppie, ‘Briefing: Western Cape Oral History Project’, University of Cape Town, 1988.
C. A. Hamilton, ‘Ideology and oral traditions: listening to the “voices from below”” History in Africa 14 (1987).
D. Henige, Oral Historiography (New York: Longman, 1982).
For a more sustained discussion of the ways in which oral traditions and oral testimonies have been distinguished from one another, and for a critique thereof, see Hamilton, ‘Ideology and Oral Traditions’.
P. la Hausse, ‘Oral history and South African historians’ in J. Brown et al., History from South Africa.
Ibid., p. 344.
Ibid., p. 345.
Ibid.
Ibid., p. 348.
Ibid., p. 349.
B. Bozzoli, ‘Intellectuals, audiences’, pp. 210–211. All emphases mine.
La Hausse, ‘Oral History’, p. 350.
Bozzoli and Delius, ‘Radical history and South African history’, p. 21.
Especially germane to the discussion in this essay is the work of D. W. Cohen and E. S. Atieno Odhiambo, Siaya: The Historical Anthropology of an African Landscape (London: James Currey, 1989), on Luo uses of history in order to understand society and culture.
D. W. Cohen, ‘The undefining of oral tradition’, Ethnohistory 36, 1 (1989).
‘The disease of writing’ is the title of Henige’s essay in Miller, ed., The African Past Speaks.
Cohen, ‘The undefining of oral tradition’, p. 15.
Peter Novick’s That Noble Dream: The ‘Objectivity Question’ and the American Historical Profession (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988), was perhaps the benchmark study in this regard.
Hofmeyr, ‘We Spend Our Years’, pp. 53–54.
Ibid., p. 54.
Ibid., p. 15.
J. L. Comaroff, ‘Rules and rulers: political processes in a Tswana chiefdom’, Man 13 (1978).
Ibid., p. 3.
Ibid., p. 4.
Ibid., p. 15.
Ibid., p. 16.
H. Klug, ‘Defining the property rights of others: political power, indigenous tenure and the construction of customary land law’, Journal of Legal Pluralism and Unofficial Law 35 (1995).
Ibid.
Hofmeyr, ‘We Spend Our Years’, p. 172.
See also I. Cunnison, ‘History of the Luapula: an essay on the historical notes of a Central African tribe’, Rhodes Livingstone Papers 21 (1951), for an early instance, and Cohen and Odhiambo, Siaya: The Historical Anthropology of an African Landscape, for a more recent instance, of the recognition of the way in which history is embedded in landscape.
This University of the Witwatersrand project, originally concerned with only materials from southern Swaziland, has widened its ambit to include materials pertinent to an area that today includes southern Mozambique and northern KwaZulu-Natal (Bonner and Hamilton, 2 vols., in preparation).
Using materials collected by the Swaziland Oral History Project, Ronette Engela is conducting archaeological research in northern KwaZulu-Natal which focuses on the relationship between historical memory and landscape. See her paper, ‘Remembered landscapes: origins of Ndwandwe identity in the northern KwaZulu-Natal landscape’, presented to the conference on New Theoretical Approaches to Interpreting Past Landscapes, University of Cape Town, 1997.
While the SWOHP materials seem to stand in some contrast to the oriki discussed by Barber, in which the emphasis is on metaphor, on ‘absent, other places’, and a metaphysical idea of location, Barber’s work is suggestive of the extent to which stories create the landscape as much as the landscape may prompt the story. (K. Barber, ‘The secretion of oriki in the material world’, Passages 7 [1994].)
See the essays presented to the workshop on ‘Texts in Objects’ held at the Institute for Advanced Study and Research in the African Humanities, Northwestern University, reproduced in Passages 7 (1994).
Memory: Luba Art and the Making of History, organised and presented by The Museum for African Art, New York (1996). See also the catalogue of the same title edited by Mary Nooter Roberts and Allen F. Roberts.
Catalogue, p. 12.
D. O. Kerner, ‘The material of memory on Kilimanjaro: mregho sticks and the exegesis of the body politic’, Passages 7 (1994).
S. Robins, ‘Transgressing the borderlands of tradition and modernity: identity, cultural hybridity and land struggles in Namaqualand (1980–1994)’, Journal of Contemporary African Studies 15,1 (1997).
Ibid., p. 26.
Ibid., p. 26, my emphasis.
Ibid.
Kerner, ‘The material of memory on Kilimanjaro: mregho sticks’.
Cohen and Odhiambo, Siaya, p. 2.
Vansina, Oral Tradition as History, p. 196.
Hofmeyr, ‘We Spend Our Years’, p. 54. Her comment on p. 54 about infantilisation is made with specific reference to fantastical stories, but the substance of the argument at this point of her study is that the fixing of these stories in school primers robs them of their flexibility and contributes to the process of infantilisation, and as such is almost the exact reverse of Henige’s anxiety.
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Hamilton, C. (2002). ‘Living by Fluidity’: Oral Histories, Material Custodies and the Politics of Archiving. In: Hamilton, C., Harris, V., Taylor, J., Pickover, M., Reid, G., Saleh, R. (eds) Refiguring the Archive. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-010-0570-8_13
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