Challenges of Studying Written and Oral Sources in Africa

One of the biggest issues facing African historians is the fact that the study of actual African History is relatively new. A large majority of the sources available are written from the point of view of Europeans, with an intended audience of Europeans.1 In this egocentric method of reporting history, Africans were viewed more as objects: a people with a past but no history.2 The written “historical” sources provided by imperialists robbed Africans of their voice. The principal challenge facing African historians is to find a way to inject the African voice into the narrative, and thus provide a more accurate representation of the continental history. This task presents more profound questions. What qualities make someone an African? Is it sufficient to be a black person living on the continent? Are there levels of ethnicity? Are the descendants of Africans brought to other parts of the world in the slave trade “Africans”? Ultimately, who decides who is “African”? Equally problematic is the issue regarding what represents a credible source, either written or oral. Each presents unique challenges that must be addressed in order to qualify the value of the information they portend to provide.
While the more traditional African historical sources are invariably prone to the problem of European bias, cave paintings offer a source that was born out of a desire of an African (not a European) to document their experiences. For example, the rock art of Gilf Kebir in what is present-day Egypt represents people allegedly engaging in the activity of swimming.3 This offers historians perhaps the oldest example of source material regarding African history, but what does this “written” source actually tell African historians? Most importantly, it definitively proves that someone was there, and through scientific dating techniques, it indicates approximately when they were there. This is real, hard evidence, which “underpins all historical research.”4
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