Recasting the Past

History Writing and Political Work in Modern Africa

Derek R. Peterson, Giacomo Macola

• Publisher: Ohio University Press
• Year: 2009
• eBook ISBN: 9780821443361
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: African History
• Index: History

The study of intellectual history in Africa is in its infancy. We know very little about what Africa's thinkers made of their times. Recasting the Past brings one field of intellectual endeavor into view. The book takes its place alongside a small but growing literature that highlights how, in autobiographies, historical writing, fiction, and other literary genres, African writers intervened creatively in their political world.
The past has already been worked over by the African interpreters that the present volume brings into view. African brokers—pastors, journalists, kingmakers, religious dissidents, politicians, entrepreneurs all—have been doing research, conducting interviews, reading archives, and presenting their results to critical audiences. Their scholarly work makes it impossible to think of African history as an inert entity awaiting the attention of professional historians. Professionals take their place in a broader field of interpretation, where Africans are already reifying, editing, and representing the past.
The essays collected in Recasting the Past study the warp and weft of Africa's homespun historical work. Contributors trace the strands of discourse from which historical entrepreneurs drew, highlighting the sources of inspiration and reference that enlivened their work. By illuminating the conventions of the past, Africa's history writers set their contemporary constituents on a path toward a particular future. History writing was a means by which entrepreneurs conjured up constituencies, claimed legitimate authority, and mobilized people around a cause. By illuminating the spheres of debate in which Africa's own scholars participated, Recasting the Past repositions the practice of modern history.

Table of contents

• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Homespun Historiography and the Academic Profession
• 1: I. B. Akinyele and Early Yoruba Print Culture
• 2: The War of the Books: Petros Lamula and the Cultural History of African Nationalism in Twentieth-Century Natal
• 3: “When You Shake a Tree”: The Precolonial and the Postcolonial in Northern Namibian History
• 4: Imagining the Nation: Harry Mwaanga Nkumbula between Politics and History
• 5: Law, Polities, and Inference
• 6: Asante Origins, Egypt, and the Near East: An Idea and Its History
• 7: In Pursuit of the “Higher Medievalism”: Local History and Politics in Kilimanjaro
• 8: States of Mind: Political History and the Rwenzururu Kingdom in Western Uganda
• 9: A Community of Suffering: Narratives of War and Exile in the Zambian Lumpa Church
• 10: Merging Ethnic Histories in Senegal: Whose Moral Community?
• 11: The King of the Mijikenda and Other Stories about the Kaya: Heritage, Politics, and Histories in Multiparty Kenya
• 12: Writing Competitive Patriotisms in Eastern Africa
• Contributors
• Index