Neglected Historiography from Africa: The Case for Postindependence Journals

Abstract

In December of 1962, at the First International Congress of Africanists, near the end of his speech outlining the new demands and promises of African history learning, teaching, and research in postindependence Africa, Nigerian historian Kenneth O. Dike, also president of the congress, reminded his audience of yet another crucial task that African scholars of various disciplinary backgrounds needed to pursue with urgency, namely the publishing of journals specializing in history. At the time, Dike had several years’ experience on the editorial board of the Journal of the Nigerian Historical Society. It, along with the Transactions of the Historical Society of Ghana, were the only journals across West Africa ‘specializing exclusively in African history, and associated with university institutions’. Dike lamented the fact that ‘material on West African history alone was scattered in well over 100 periodical publications issued in many mutually distinct parts of the world in seven or eight different languages’ and that many of these articles had not undergone a thorough peerreview process to filter out ‘defective material’. Who better to lead the academy in this endeavor than scholars from Anglophone and Francophone West Africa themselves, he noted. President Kwame Nkrumah, in one of the opening speeches at the Accra congress, which has been described as an intellectual offshoot of the First All-African Peoples’ Conference, suggested that while ‘Africa has been the question mark of history’, the time had come to rewrite and broadly disseminate