African historians frequently argue that it is almost impossible to research postcolonial
history because of the absence or haphazard nature of African archives. I argue that this is …

I originally organized the roundtable on which these papers are based for no more
intellectual reason than I had not been to a meeting of the African Studies Association for …

I am a professor of the history of Africa. I have spent four decades researching and writing
about the historic West African forest kingdom of Asante (or Ashanti, now in Ghana), the …

This book is the result of unlimited effort from various individuals and institutions. The topics
and themes came from an enriching brainstorming and back-and-forth communication and …

I argue here against two things: fetishizing the power and wholesomeness of colonial
archives, and equating the scarcity of post-1960 repositories with new difficulties to write the …

For some time now, scholars have recognized the archive less as a neutral repository of
documents of the past, and rather more as a politically interested representation of it, and …

The goal of African history is not only to establish a chronology of events but also to recover
the past from the local African perspective. The challenge is how to recover local ways of …

Work on volume 7 of the Cambridge History of Africa, covering the years 1905-1940, has
obliged me to reflect on the nature of the literature for this period in African history. The past …

THANKFULLY, HISTORIANS HAVE COME A LONG WAY from the late Hugh Trevor-Roper's
dismissive barb made in 1 963:" Perhaps in thefuture there will be some African history to …

The long southern African past before the advent of European colonialism remains
neglected despite powerful post-apartheid impulses of various kinds for its recovery and …