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BOOK REVIEWS
| AFRICAN WORDS, AFRICAN VOICES: CRITICAL PRACTICES IN ORAL HISTORY. Edited by Luise White, Stephan F. Miescher, and David William Cohen. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001. 332 pp. Hardbound $49.95; Softbound $22.95.
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The practice of oral history has been central to the study of African history since the mid-1960s. With the publication of Oral Tradition: A Study in Historical Methodology by Jan Vansina in 1965, scholars began to utilize local oral traditions as a source for reconstructing the precolonial African past, a common necessity given that the majority of African societies south of the Sahara did not have written languages. Equally significant, such sources placed emphasis on African perspectives, thus providing a much-needed balance to Eurocentric accounts then prevalent. Despite this advance in methodology, there also began a long-standing debate among historians about the proper means of analyzing such sources to achieve a confident level of historical accuracy. Much of this debate has focused on method and the context of oral history collection—from whom, under what conditions—and its consequent impact on the data gathered. Vansina, after all, was conducting his research in the postcolonial Zaire of Mobutu Sese Seko. To what extent might this uncertain and autocratic political context have shaped what his informants were willing to tell? This edited collection of essays seeks to address this kind of question in order to achieve a better sense of the limitations and possibilities of practicing oral history in contemporary Africa. |
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Based on two international conferences held in 1997, one at the Bellagio Center in Italy and one at the University of Michigan, this volume collects thirteen essays total from a range of established and younger scholars. An admirable quality of this book is this diversity, also reflected in its broad geographic inclusion of scholars from throughout Africa as well as academics working in the United States and Europe. In their useful introduction, David William Cohen, Stephan Miescher, and Luise White lay out the intentions of the collection: to take stock of the current state of oral history practice in Africa, and in the process, interrogate methodologies and the meaning of terms that have become accepted convention, in particular the idea of "voice" and its relationship to concerns of "authenticity" and historical reliability. |
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As the editors point out, African voices have always been a part of writing on Africa, from slave narratives of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, to colonial commissions of inquiry during the twentieth century, to contemporary academic studies in history and anthropology. This ubiquity consequently poses a challenge to Vansina's assumed originality in using oral sources, while also raising broader questions as to the changing role of "voices" within texts over time. The editors underscore that the debate over context can largely be attributed to a generational difference—between Vansina's early concern for a social scientific methodology that would lead to a discernible historical truth versus a more recent, Geertz-ian perspective that oral evidence is a text that is shaped and can be interpreted in a variety of ways. Separate fields such as gender studies have further contributed to the latter understanding by introducing the concept of "life histories," an oral genre that includes common people and their experience, thus moving the practice away from "oral traditions" that have largely concerned precolonial state politics. Cohen, Miescher, and White helpfully outline these shifts in the field and the consequent tensions that have resulted, though they do not take a categorical position as to how oral history should be practiced. Instead, they emphasize the existing range of methodological possibilities, the need for self-criticism, and the ongoing importance of oral evidence, even if factual certainty may at times be elusive. |
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The essays are divided into three sections. In the first section, "Giving Africa a History," the general theme among the contributions is the foundational role that oral history has played in establishing the modern discipline of African history. Recovering the precolonial past and re-centering African voices and perspectives were particularly important during the 1960s when newly independent African countries were seeking a "usable past" that could bolster postcolonial sentiments. However, such connections between history and politics were not without contestation as each piece demonstrates. Tensions frequently existed between academics, local communities, and state authorities over the interpretation of history. Consequently, as Bethwell Ogot writes, scholars need a better understanding of "the social functions of folk history" (32) in order to better situate and analyze such evidence. This central argument is carried over into the sections that follow. |
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The four essays that comprise the second section, "African Lives," extend this theme by exploring the relationship between the oral informant and the scholar in the field. The contributors to this section are particularly interested in the question of how a broader social history can be derived from individual testimony. In her essay on the Okiek in Kenya, Corinne Kratz notes the complex, unclassifiable nature of field conversations and asserts that they are "genres-in-the-making at best" (151). Through a study of masculinity in colonial Ghana, Stephan Miescher similarly critiques simplistic understandings of "life history" collection by observing the multiple roles and contradictory experiences that can coexist within a single life. The personal rationales that unify such fragmentation constitute the subject of his study, rather than the factual details alone. Tamara Giles-Vernick also discusses how testimony may only be one facet of a constellation of things holding memory: an agricultural practice, a food, even a place in a room containing a buried child beneath its floor; all contain stories waiting to be invoked and told. |
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The last section of essays, entitled "African Imaginations," ventures further to elaborate these new entry points for oral history. Kwesi Yankah describes the historical components of oral folk tales used in Ghanaian political discourse, while Laura Fair investigates the music of Sinti binti Saadi, a Zanzibar pop star of the 1920s and 1930s, as a historical source for this period. David William Cohen's essay concerns the death of a government minister in contemporary Kenya, providing a stimulating analysis of how oral testimony may constitute "a truth" that becomes "the truth" (265, 278). Complex webs of power shape the content and social impact of testimony. In the final essay of the book, Luise White takes this perspective to an extreme by examining vampire rumors in Kenya and Uganda. She argues that even though such supernatural phenomena did not factually exist, such stories still provide "windows into worlds of colonial control" (299). The conventional true/false dichotomy may therefore create blind spots that if critically addressed could expand the interpretive possibilities of oral evidence. |
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In sum, this collection interrogates the practice of oral history in many ways, pointing to limitations as well as untapped potential. If often conceptual in focus, it is still important to recognize the origins of these essays in well-grounded research. The best of them are, in a sense, stories of failure. Megan Vaughan, Giles-Vernick, and others fruitfully incorporate personal memoir into their chapters to convey the ongoing lessons of try-and-try-again that are learned in the field. Such essays combined with the introduction's overview make this a recommended volume for teaching students the basics of fieldwork methodology. This collection should also be of interest to practitioners of oral history outside of Africa seeking a summary of recent innovation, though the inclusion of maps would have been helpful in this regard. Overall, this is an important collection, sure to advance discussion in new directions. |
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| Christopher J. Lee |
| Harvard University |
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