Writing African History: Beginnings, Methods, and Debates

Harvard FAS

This course focuses on the development of African history as a field in the academic discipline of history. History developed as an archive-based discipline in nineteenth-century Europe with an emphasis on written records and European ideas of human progress. The German philosopher Hegel would opine that: “Africa is no historical part of the world; it has no movement or development to exhibit.” Such commentators usually excluded Egypt from the rest of Africa, ignored Africa’s rich oral…