African History: the Contribution of the Social Sciences

Extract

In nearly all the major historical fields one can see the increasing use historians are making of methods, models, and insights from the social sciences. E. H. Carr's exhortation, that the more history becomes sociology and the more sociology becomes history the better for both, is being taken seriously. Yet there is much more that can be done to bring these fields together. Most historians have used sociological theory only to gain insight, not with great rigour. They have learned their sociology by osmosis, so to speak. They have not gone through the social science literature, but rather have soaked it up second-hand from other interpreters. Consequently their works have not had the precision they might. Concepts have been distorted because of a lack of familiarity with them. African historians, on the whole, have been reluctant to use this rich and suggestive literature. This is probably true because the greatest efforts have been made in finding new sources in this difficult field—oral tradition, linguistic evidence, and so forth. But one is hard pressed to find works by African historians which have employed the theoretical literature of the social sciences.