white and black. For me, it was one of the earliest spurs towards the present study.
In 1962, Roland Oliver and J.D. Fage published the first edition of their Short History of Africa, which would remain over many editions a standard introduction to its subject, its approach adumbrated by Ronald Segal in the Penguin African Library version of 1975: ‘Much of Africa’s past has now been excavated from ignorance and error. Yet the study of African history has hardly begun’ (1975, 10). A similar service was rendered by Ronald Robinson, John Gallagher and Alice Denny in Africa and the Victorians: The Official Mind of Imperialism (1961/1970), which presented ‘the paradoxical nature of late-Victorian imperial expansion in Africa’ (1970, 25) as a process that neither matched the visions of the proconsuls of empire nor wholly deserved the chastisements of Afrocentrist critics.
The balanced assessments characteristic of such works have not fared well. Oliver and Fage would go on to become the doyens among English historians of Africa, co-responsible for the editing of the eight-volume Cambridge History of Africa that began publication in 1974. Their version of a recuperative history of Africa would, however, fall short of the expectations and agendas of indigenous historians of the very continent that the work was designed to promote. The rival UNESCO General History of Africa began publication in 1981, and in Chapter 1, I deal with its questionable representations of ancient Egypt’s relationships with the rest of Africa. When in 1985 Roland Oliver felt obliged to write a sharply dissident review of such fanciful historiography (867–8), this time as exhibited in Volume 7, Africa under Colonial Domination 1880–1935, he was savaged by the Nigerian historian, Chinweizu, as a lackey of ‘colonialist ideology’ and as now redundant: ‘Oliver’s review is the sort of attack which a jaded orthodoxy is liable to make on its supplanters as it is being pushed off the stage’ (1985, 1062).
The impulses of reaction and rejection that marked the emergence of an indigenous African historiography between the 1950s and the 1980s, and inspired such hostile responses to its Western counterpart (however sympathetic), will remain a theme of the present study. As we shall see, such dissent was rendered increasingly inevitable in the wake of broader controversies and contradictions generated by the uneasy league between postcolonial and postmodernist onslaughts on the ‘master narratives’ of Western colonialism and imperialism.
More orthodox literary, historical and ethnographic research continued to open up new stopes of information on the Euro-African past. The first volume of Robin Hallett’s The Penetration of Africa: European Enterprise and Exploration Principally in Northern and Western Africa up to 1830 appeared in 1965 and revealed the vast number of relevant works on northern and western Africa that had been published by 1815 – indeed, so vast that the second volume was never published.
Part of the problem of reinterpretation that this new wave of scholarship had to confront was the sheer abundance of low-grade information that had stacked up over the centuries, as Anthony J. Barker found in 1978. His work, The African Link, which attempted to review ‘British Atitudes to the Negro in the Era of the African Slave Trade 1550–1807’, revealed that a mass of descriptive literature on Africa was available in Britain by the eighteenth century, but that most of it was derivative or merely compendious in the repetitive accumulation of indiscriminate and uncomprehended detail. The material was there, but the keys were lost.
Nevertheless, these Renaissance and Enlightenment compendia – one thinks of the great collections of travel accounts from Ramusio (1550), De Bry (1597–1628), Hakluyt (1598–1600), and Purchas (1625) to the Churchills (1704), Harris (1705), Astley (1745), and Osborne (1745) – although often soulless in their limited comprehension of African societies, would, for my purpose and for that very reason, prove invaluable in their revelation and confirmation of the popular images of Africa and its peoples at the time. Poor history can still make good stories, and it was the European ‘story’ of Africa that increasingly concerned me. Furthermore, the sheer descriptive and anecdotal density of these compendia does at times reflect a substantive, despite inadequate, ethnographic impulse that must caution against sweeping dismissal. A recent verdict such as that of Kate Lowe, that ‘to the majority of Europeans, the defining feature was African skin colour, and nothing else [my emphasis] … mattered, and consequently nothing else was recorded’ (Lowe, 2005, 6), is simply not true, ignoring as it does libraries full of earnest, albeit amateurish, ethnographic record.
Histories of ‘the image of Africa’ rather than of the continent itself soon began to emerge as popular narrative sources became academically respectable, the discourse of revision unfolded, and African Studies programmes proliferated, especially in the United States of America. Philip D. Curtin’s The Image of Africa: British Ideas and Action 1780–1850 appeared in 1964, and remained for decades an important survey of the colonialist assumptions that continued to rile revisionists. By 1966, Robin Winks could assemble an impressive cohort of Africanists to contribute the African chapters to his Historiography of the British Empire-Commonwealth, even if, despite his opening comment that ‘societies not yet nations are using the anvil of their history to beat out their claims to a separate identity’ (1966, 3), none of the authors of the African chapters were black Africans. He also had to confront an awkward truth: ‘The problems represented by nationalism, racial antagonisms, oral traditions, and illiterate or semi-literate societies are not readily reducible to the historian’s traditional tools and attitudes’ (1966, 21). Yet, despite such difficulties, the Nigerian scholar K.O. Dike (1956), as well as Michael Crowder (1968), L.H. Gann and Peter Duignan (1968), and Monica Wilson and Leonard Thompson (1969) succeeded in producing seminal new histories of West, sub-Saharan and Southern Africa, and would soon be joined by several others.
By 1975, Theodore Besterman could produce a voluminous World Bibliography of African Bibliographies, a further witness to the rapid expansion of African Studies programmes. Five years earlier, John N. Paden and Edward J. Soja had opened their three-volume collection of essays, The African Experience (1970), with a report on the ‘phenomenal growth’ of African Studies in the United States as, in the words of Gwendolen Carter in the Preface, ‘the sheer drama of the process [of African independence had] captured world-wide attention’ (1: viii). The drama had also, of course, captured the attention and inspired the polemics of an emergent black scholarship committed to exposing the roots and course of colonial discrimination and slavery, projects that demanded the further rewriting of African history. As one contributor to the Paden-Soja volumes, John A. Rowe, put it: ‘It seems hardly a coincidence that 1957 saw both the independence of Ghana … and the introduction of African history into American classrooms’ (1970, 1. 154).
A slate of doctoral dissertations on the Eurocolonial encounter with Africa, all revisionist and all offering strictly binarist and minatory readings of that encounter, soon emerged. Some of these theses and the articles or monographs they inspired confronted the relatively straightforward histories of explorers, settlers and colonial administrators (Rogers, 1970; Casada, 1972; Smith, 1972; Gallup, 1973; Luther, 1979), but others turned to the more indirect production and proliferation of images of Africa in literary sources (Knipp, 1969; Rose, 1970; Miller, 1972; Linnemann, 1972; Steins, 1972; Jacobs, 1975; Schneider, 1976; Harris-Schenz, 1977; James, 1977; McDorman, 1977; Taube, 1979; Milbury-Steen, 1980).
Some were the workmanship of an early wave of African scholars studying at American and European universities, although their findings could also not proceed much further along the binarist tracks evidently sanctioned by their supervisors (Opoku, 1967; Wali, 1967; Fanoudh-Seifer, 1968; Okoye, 1969/1971; Adewumi, 1977). The argument of one of the earliest of these is typical: ‘The dominant image of the Negro … is one of hopelessness, passivity and innocent naivety, and the relation envisaged between the white and black races is one of teacher and taught, the ward and the novice’ (Wali, 1967, 62). Several articles and monographs of these years duplicated the findings of such dissertations (Randles, 1956, 1959; McCullough, 1962; Bolt, 1971; Frederickson, 1971; Johnson, 1971; Walvin, 1972; Mark, 1974; Parry, 1974; Barnett, 1975; Street, 1975; Berghahn, 1977; Mahood, 1977; Lorimer, 1978).
