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Preface

Until Lions Have Their Own Historians, the Story of the Hunt Will Always Glorify the Hunter—Africanizing History, Feminizing Knowledge

Whose histories, whose stories, whose archives? Almost six decades ago, Africanist historian Terence Ranger pondered the question of to what degree African history was actually truly African, and whether the methods and concerns derived from Western historiography were in fact sufficient tools for researching and narrating African history. This issue remains a foremost concern of many African-born researchers such as myself, who continue to question the manner in which African worlds have historically and contemporarily been (re)constructed.

We are cognizant of the fact that Africa was the site of some of the worst external abuses, a reality which resulted in a production of knowledge that has almost exclusively been shaped by these influences. We also share concerns regarding the ability of Africans to tell their own stories, on their own terms, free from Eurocentric biases. We are especially concerned about this because the inconceivable and arbitrary violence born out of slavery and colonial discourse has produced an African canon that is as dehumanizing and silencing as brute force.

From Muslim traders and travelers of the seventh to fifteenth centuries documenting African worlds in their travel logs to the accounts of European and Arab slavers, travelers, missionaries, and colonialists writing African worlds during the age of exploration, international slave trades, and conquest, these narratives have survived in what the eighth king of Dahomey, King Agonglo, described in 1793 as “books that never die,” chronicling historical perspectives that were variously skewed, incomplete, and/or ethnocentric in their leanings. It is these narratives that have propelled the very nature of Africanist scholarship in the present day. Again, I ask, whose stories, whose histories, whose archives?

Given this historical reality, I have responded to the challenge of Africanizing and feminizing knowledge by attempting to restore voice and dignity to a people beset with memories of having been reduced to objects by slavers and colonial oppressors. I have done this by (re)framing and (re)telling the African gendered narrative in solidly African-centered and gendered terms. The end result is a body of scholarship—six monographs and a slew of journal articles and book chapters—that is unapologetically African-centered.

I have not rested easy with simply writing back at the received African canon. I have also, for the past twenty-five years, dedicated my career to honing my teaching of African history in the US college classroom. At Michigan State University, I have developed and taught several award-winning undergraduate-level courses on Africa, courses in which I have disseminated African-centered knowledge about Africa to thousands of young and inquiring minds.

In this context, I see myself as a missionary in reverse: one whose job it is to teach African worlds on their own terms; a person whose job it is to teach Africa in ways that Africans themselves conceptualize their histories and their worlds. And the end result of this pedagogical odyssey are histories that do not always neatly fit into Western-defined models of historical writing, understanding, and interpretation. Take for instance the fact that Africans do not necessarily conceptualize their histories in exclusively linear and strictly chronological terms. The proof of this can be found when a researcher approaches a living African archive, an African elder, with the following clear-sighted questions: “What year did a particular event occur?” or “How old are you?” These questions may seem simple and straightforward, and thus could be expected to elicit simple and straightforward answers. But, no sooner does the elder respond that he or she does not know what year the incident happened—or, worse still, shares with said researcher that he or she is about one hundred and fifty years old—than said researcher realizes that he or she has not asked the right questions. The right questions, the African-informed questions, should not be “In what year did a particular event occur?” or “How old are you?” They instead should be framed to discern what might have been happening historically around the time of the event or the elder’s birth. Questions such as these would be sure to elicit more precise answers, answers such as the following: “The event occurred when daytime became nighttime” (read: during the coming of the locusts); or “I was born during the time of the great destroyer” (read: during the Great Influenza). Again, I ask, whose questions? Whose archives? Whose answers? For informed inquiry elicits informed answers and interpretations.

I teach what I describe to my students as the history of “Another Africa,” an Africa that they most likely will not find in the average run-of-the-mill textbook. But it is the Africa that I know intimately, that I breathe, that I love. It is the Africa of my mother, grandmother, and all the African women who have, during my past twenty-five years of researching and writing African gendered worlds, entrusted me with their stories. It is an African history that continental Africans recognize and see themselves in. These are our histories, our stories, our archives.