Writing History
Historians throughout the ages have been beset by many pitfalls in their attempts to write history.Modern historians writing the history of Africa not only face problems similar to those experienced by their colleagues writing the history of other cultures.Most medieval African societies south of the Sahara lacked an alphabet and a written language.African written languages were confined mainly to Ethiopia,to Sudan,and to the maritime cities of the east coast.Early Greek, Roman,Amharic,Fulani,and Swahili texts still survive to give us some idea of bygone days.Future collectors will almost certainly find additional records when they search for documents in North Africa and in faraway countries like Iran and Saudi Arabia.In tropical countries,however,old papers are preserved only with great difficulty,for white ants and atmospheric humidity pose serious problems even to modern archivists.Early record keepers were even less equal to their task,and much material has been lost or destroyed.
The lack of written material means that we shall never be able to read,for example,the memoirs of a king of the Luba people in the eighteenth century. Worse still,we cannot draw on administrative archives.Dull as they look, administrative files have a peculiar value denied to other written records.They are composed of documents drawn up or used in the course of an administrative or executive transaction of which they had formed a part.This does not necessarily make official memorandums,communiques,and such more reliable, for officials often enough were dishonest with their inferiors and superiors alike. But-unlike the authors of so many biographies-they hardly ever wrote in order to deceive posterity;hence,archival evidence has an unusual degree of authenticity.The lack of such material makes the historian’s job hard indeed.For where there is no writing,there are large areas of human behavior that cannot be described accurately except by speculative extrapolations from literate cultures or by conjectures determined to a large extent by our own cultural preconceptions.
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