Oxford Research Encyclopedia of African History
Oxford Research Encyclopedias African History
Afrocentrism
Colonial Conquest and Rule
Early States and State Formation in Africa
East Africa and Indian Ocean
Historical Linguistics
Historical Preservation and Cultural Heritage
Historiography and Methods
Image of Africa
Invention of Tradition
Language and History
North Africa and the Gulf
Northeastern Africa
Oral Traditions
Slavery and Slave Trade
Colonial Conquest and Rule (1)
Historical Preservation and Cultural Heritage (1)
Historiography and Methods (3)
Slavery and Slave Trade (1)
Women's History (1)
Keywords: theory x
Historiography and Methods x
The Dar es Salaam School of African History
Gregory H. Maddox
The Dar es Salaam School of African History refers to the work of a group of historians based at what became the University of Dar es Salaam in Tanzania. Led initially by Terrance O. Ranger, the scholars of the History Department there in the late 1960s focused on researching and writing a new history for a newly independent nation. The works produced focused on the idea of Africans making their own history and on the rise of anticolonial nationalism. They most immediately argued that common oppression by colonial states created the conditions for the development of organic national movements for liberation. This later aspect led this type of history to be called nationalist history. By the late 1960s, historians at Dar es Salaam had developed a critique of nationalist history that used Marxist theory to explain the domination of Africa under colonialism and its continued subjection in the postcolonial era to the capitalist world system. Led at first by Walter Rodney but taken up by a number of younger Tanzanian historians, this movement led some to call it the New Dar es Salaam School. The proponents of this consciously radical approach to history argued that nationalist historians had romanticized African nationalist movements and failed to identify them as heirs to the opporesive and exploitative nature of colonialism. They concluded that independence represented only the first step in the true liberation of Africa. Both of these approaches to history have had significant influence on the study of African history across the continent.
Reading the Archives as Sources
David M. Gordon
Archives used in Africanist historical research include those of the colonial state, postcolonial national archives, missionary archives, personal papers, political party archives, and the archives of corporations and international agencies involved in African affairs. Africanists historians generally accept that these archives are not transparent renditions of the past; they represent and even reproduce power relations related to colonialism and its legacies. Nonetheless, careful readings have enabled Africanist historians to understand the structural order and logic these archives (the archival grain), and thus demonstrate colonial (or other) power relations implicated in the collections. Reading archives against the grain can also reveal alternative voices and agents, however. Even as discussions of archival methodologies have been limited, archives have remained crucial sources for key trends in Africanist historical writing, including the representation of colonial hegemonies as well as African voice and agency. To advance such readings, Africanist historians develop post-positivist readings of archives that appreciate silences, dissonances, and conflicts within archives and documentation. Through a process of archival fieldwork, including a careful combing of archives, reading of files, and transcribing of select documents, historians have become adept at appreciating the grain of archives and reading the archive against this grain. The digitization of archives and digital research methods, including electronic search engines, full-text searches, online archives, and digital photography, challenge aspects of traditional archival fieldwork, holding benefits and potential setbacks for the critical appreciation of archival documentation. These challenges have sharpened with the changing role of physical documentation along with an increase in smaller archives that enable serendipitous and hodgepodge archival investigations.
African Masculinities
Ndubueze L. Mbah
As a system of identity, African masculinity is much more than a cluster of norms, values, and behavioral patterns expressing explicit and implicit expectations of how men should act and represent themselves to others. It also refers to more than how African male bodies, subjectivities, and experiences are constituted in specific historical, cultural, and social contexts. African masculinities, as historical subjects embodying distinctive socially constructed gender and sexual identities, have been both male and female. By occupying a masculine sociopolitical position, embodying masculine social traits, and performing cultural deeds socially construed and symbolized as masculine, African men and women have constituted masculinity. Across various African societies and times, there have been multiple and conflicting notions of masculinities, promoted by local and foreign institutions, and there have been ceaseless contestations and synergies among the various forms of hegemonic, subordinate, and subversive African masculinities. Men and women have frequently brought their own agendas to bear on the political utility of particular notions of masculinity. Through such performances of masculinity, Africans have constantly negotiated the institutional power dynamics of gender relations. So, the question is not whether Africans worked with gender binaries, because they did. As anthropologist John Wood puts it, African indigenous logic of gender becomes evident in the juxtaposition, symbolic reversals, and interrelation of opposites. Rather, one should ask, why and how did African societies generate a fluid gender system in which biological sex did not always correspond to gender, such that anatomically male and female persons could normatively occupy socially constructed masculine and feminine roles and vice versa? And how did African mutually constitutive gender and sexuality constructions shape African societies?
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