11 - Data Collection and Interpretation in the Social History of Africa

Summary

Discussions at academic and policy forums all over the world are evidence of a growing interest in Africa's social history. Meanwhile, since the 1960s, when most African nations regained their independence from erstwhile colonial masters, the continent's social, political, and economic conditions have been going from bad to worse. Although attempts to explain these developments have thus far been monopolized by social scientists, African problems might be better understood from a historical standpoint, for history digs more deeply than political science, sociology, or anthropology in explaining the etiology of social problems.

Unfortunately, few historians have shown an interest in explaining the growing problems in African development. This unsatisfactory situation should be reversed; historians, especially those within Africa, should show more interest in the study of social problems on the African continent, thus enabling them to make better contributions to contemporary African development. This chapter addresses some salient methodological issues that social historians must take into consideration in their bid to understand the challenge of social development in Africa.

A historian has two main responsibilities: collecting the facts and interpreting them. These tasks are intertwined:

To do the one without the other reduces the historian to either a chronicler or a teller of tales. From ancient times, of course, history has always been part chronicle and part tale, but in our modern age previous generations of historians, under the impact of science, have set out to collect and interpret the facts scientifically, seeking to arrive at an objective and true rendering of history.

Thus, this chapter has two objectives: to discuss, first, how the data for writing the social history of Africa can be collected and, second, how to interpret these facts. The tasks before us might not, in fact, be too different from what beset those writing the social history of other parts of the world. Social history is basically interested in human actions. As Nzemeke tells us in 1989, the actions of humans everywhere have a fundamental similarity, notwithstanding the cultural variations that condition them. It is difficult to claim exclusive peculiarity for the social history of Africa, for history is simply history. What is probably peculiar to Africa is that social history is not very popular—especially among the indigenous historians. This is surprising, considering the degree of social transformation that has taken place in different parts of the continent, especially since the beginning of the twentieth century.