This lively volume focuses on what the editors call Africa's homespun historians: non-professionals who, throughout the twentieth century, devoted passionate and painstaking intellectual labor to recreating the past, often in vernacular languages. In an incisive introduction, Peterson and Macola argue that the writings of these historians have been given inadequate attention. Guild historians often think it sufficient to mine the vernacular histories as unmediated reflections of customary knowledge, the same type of knowledge supposedly provided by oral ‘informants’. Or, if the professionals recognize the labor of research, interpretation, and evaluation of sources that went into the amateurs' efforts, that very labor taints their texts in the professionals' view and reduces their usefulness as sources. This volume is presented as an effort to call attention to the precise ways in which the creative labors of these subaltern intellectuals shaped not only the archives (oral and written) on which guild historians rely but also many events in Africa's modern political history.
One might quibble that the editors overstate the discipline's previous neglect of homespun historians. Still, their volume makes a welcome intervention in African intellectual history. In many ways, it is a model of the genre. The contributions are all excellent, many exceptionally so. The chapters' shared focus on how historical narratives were crafted to conjure political communities into being gives the book coherence. Yet they also cover a broad range of subjects and methodologies. Together, they demonstrate the variety and originality of Africa's non-professional historiography and its significance to the continent's modern history.
The volume opens with four studies of individual historians. Macola's study of the early writings by the Zambian nationalist Harry Mwaanga Nkumbula shows that they reflect an agenda fully compatible with civic nationalism, one quite different from that suggested by Nkumbula's later career as an ethnic entrepreneur. Patricia Hayes introduces us to a preacher from northern Namibia whose detailed narratives of precolonial history advance a homespun discourse of ‘progress’, rooted in Ovambo ideas of social health but at the same time reflective of the political concerns of the time when she interviewed him. Karin Barber uses the literary career of I. B. Akinyele to illustrate how history-writing was a key component of Yoruba intellectuals' efforts to foster a ‘civic print culture’ and thus convene new kinds of audience. She elegantly demonstrates how Akinyele did this through new literary forms that he created by radically altering the conventions of Yoruba oral historiography. The printed word was also important to early nationalists in KwaZulu-Natal. Paul la Hausse de Lalouvière focuses on a vernacular history of the Zulu by Petros Lamula that went through several editions in the 1920s and 1930s and was of considerable political importance. Yet both Lamula and his text have been virtually forgotten, and la Hausse asks why. The answer, he suggests, has much to do with how the orthodoxies of South African politics have shaped professional historiography and obscured nationalism's cultural history. His essay has much to say about the densely woven intellectual circuits that linked white and black thinkers and made the splintered discourses of nationalism very much joint creations.
Because of the cosmopolitan breadth of influences on which the homespun historians drew and of the audiences they hoped to address, Peterson and Macola reject describing them as ‘ethno-’ or ‘local’ historians: although they spun at home, they used fibers from many parts of the globe. The book's second section highlights such entanglements. Emma Hunter looks at activists who, starting in 1949, agitated for the appointment of a Chagga paramount chief. British administrators and the nationalists who eventually formed TANU both thought this a step backward. But Hunter shows how the activists' writings on Chagga history engaged with the same ideas of progress and democracy that underlay TANU rhetoric – ideas derived from hegemonic understandings of Britain's own history. In the first of two essays on Asante, Richard Rathbone asks why academic studies of Akan history are so dominated by a legalistic emphasis on ‘constitutions’. A simple answer is that the pioneering historians of the 1960s and 1970s got carried away by their anti-colonialist sympathies and thus did all they could to portray Asante as a polity that functioned as rationally as had any European constitutional monarchy. But Rathbone tells a more complex story. Wilks and the other scholars were heirs to a decades-old historiographic tradition that, though deriving its central concepts ultimately from the West, was pioneered by African intellectuals such as Casely Hayford and Mensah Sarbah. R. S. Rattray, the Scottish author of Ashanti Law and Constitution, was but an intermediate link in the chain, who connected his African precursors with successors such as J. B. Danquah. (All four men, significantly, were lawyers.) T. C. McCaskie reconstructs the curious history of the notion that Asante originated in the ancient Near East. At first, this was an entirely European drama, with Thomas Bowdich playing the lead, and supporting roles taken by figures as diverse as Herodotus, Cuvier, and Lady Lugard. But, in the 1930s, an embattled Asantehene commissioned a history that sought to bolster the prestige of the monarchy by tracing its origins to a lost tribe of Israel. Since then, such narratives have resonated with the diffusionist historical paradigms that have ensnared many subsequent intellectuals, including Danquah and American Afrocentrists.
The book's final two sections focus on political projects undertaken in the context of the hegemonic civic nation-state. Justin Willis examines debates in contemporary coastal Kenya in which authority is linked to elder status and the Mijikenda ritual spaces known as kayas. Although the nature of that authority and even the number and location of the kayas are sharply disputed, Willis demonstrates that the disputes do not involve simple ‘invention’: previously held historical knowledge, fragmented and differentially valued, provided the material for debate and imposed limits on what kind of knowledge could be newly generated. Peterson offers a subtle account of dissident royalism in postcolonial western Uganda, where activists used historical narratives as tools to demand recognition of a Rwenzururu kingdom separate from the Toro kingdom.
Peterson's chapter illustrates how the varied intellectual and political projects that observers label irredentism, subnationalism, or tribalism all share elements with one another and with territorial nationalism. That lesson comes across with particular force in David Gordon's chapter on the Lumpa Church of Zambia. The revelations of its prophet, informed by an amalgam of Western and Bemba motifs, were transformed by the experience of persecution and exile into a historical consciousness of belonging to a separate community, the Bena Lesa, or people of God. On the surface, this is not a story about ethnicity or nation at all: the Bena Lesa imagine their collective self not in terms of shared descent, dynastic rule, or citizenship in a territorial nation-state, but in terms of shared suffering. Utilizing concepts formulated in John Lonsdale's capstone chapter, Gordon notes that the patriotisms generated by historical discourse need not refer to communities of tribe or nation. But the fascinating process he describes might nevertheless be understood as an ethnic nation in the making. Etienne Smith also draws on Lonsdale to make a quite different point. In recent years, dissident historians have taken to celebrating Senegal's peripheral ethnic communities – not to fragment Senegalese national solidarity but to advance an alternative to its official Wolof- and Islam-centered narrative. They do this, Smith writes, by focusing on the practice of the joking relationship, which they ‘reinvent’ as a central aspect of precolonial political cultures that enjoined and enabled relationships of equality across ethnic lines. The implication of Smith's argument (also prominent in the chapters by Macola, Hunter, and Lonsdale) is that historical celebrations of the ‘petites patries’ are not necessarily inimical to the solidarities of the civic nation-state.
A review of this book must note a significant limitation: its neglect of Islamic historiographic traditions. But that is a vast topic in itself, and I note its omission not as criticism but merely in the hope that some enterprising scholars might put together a companion volume as rich and compelling as this one.
