A Primer for Teaching African History: Ten Design Principles 9780822391944

Citation preview

4^ A Primer for Teaching African History 64

Design Principles for Teaching History A series edited by Antoinette Burton

A Primer for Teaching African History 4^ Ten Design Principles 64 Trevor R. Getz

Duke University Press Durham and London 2018

© 2018 Duke University Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America on acid-­free paper ∞ Text designed by Jennifer Hill Typeset in Garamond Premier Pro by Graphic Composition, Inc., Bogart, Georgia Library of Congress Cataloging-­in-Publication Data Names: Getz, Trevor R., author. Title: A primer for teaching African history : ten design principles / Trevor R. Getz. Description: Durham : Duke University Press, 2018. | Series: Design principles for teaching history | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: lccn 2017036794 (print) lccn 2017056623 (ebook) isbn 9780822391944 (ebook) isbn 9780822371038 (hardcover : alk. paper) isbn 9780822369820 (pbk. : alk. paper) Subjects: lcsh: Africa—History—Study and teaching (Secondary) | Africa—History—Study and teaching (Higher) | Africa—Study and teaching—Handbooks, manuals, etc. Classification: lcc dt19.8 (ebook) | lcc dt19.8 .g48 2018 (print) | ddc 960.071—dc23 lc record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017036794 Cover art and frontispiece: Memory board (lukasa), nineteenth century. Artist unknown. Eastern Luba peoples, Democratic Republic of the Congo. Wood, beads, nails, cowries. 1997.126. Used by permission of Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts at Stanford University; gift of Marc and Ruth Franklin.

4^ Contents 64

Acknowledgments  vii Introduction 1 1

%7 Part I &5

Conceiving a Student-­C entered Course 9

One

A Place to Begin: What Students Bring with Them 13 Two

Setting Goals: Why Should Students Study African History? 27

%7 Part II &5 Content and Design 47

Three

Locating Africa: Designing with Space 49

Four

When Was Africa? Designing with Time 67 Five

Who Are Africans? Designing with Identity 79 Six

Making Hard Choices: Coverage and Uncoverage 91

%7 Part III &5 Opportunities 101

Seven

Ethical Thinking as an Outcome of the African History Course 103 Eight

Teaching Methodology and Source Interpretation through the African History Course 113 Nine

The African History Course and the Other Digital Divide 125 Ten

Bringing It All Together 137 Notes 151 Selected Bibliography 165 Index 167

4^ Acknowledgments 64

This book would not have been possible without decades of hard work by the pioneering generations of historians of Africa and their successors. My particular inspirations and heroes include, among many, men and women like Walter Rodney, Joseph Ki-­Zerbo, A. Adu Boahen, Boubacar Barry, Jean Allman, Richard Roberts, and Helen Bradford. I lean heavily on works from skilled teacher-­scholars including Amina Mama, Curtis Keim, Toyin Falola, Hakeem Ibikunle Tijane, Ned Alpers, R. E. O. Akpofure, Jonathan Reynolds, Richard Reid, and George F. Sefa Dei. I owe a huge personal debt of gratitude to my guides into the field of African history: Tabitha Kanogo at the University of California at Berkeley, Christopher Saunders at the University of Cape Town, and Richard Rathbone, who was my dissertation supervisor at the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London. I learned to teach from my mother, Jennifer Getz, and to think critically from my father, Wayne Getz. Special thanks also to Antoinette Burton, the creator of this series and both a mentor and a friend. I am deeply fortunate to be surrounded by a circle of considerate and thoughtful colleagues on whom I have relied heavily. Specifically, the following Africanists provided me with a great deal of assistance and material for this volume: Maxim Matusevich, Seton Hall University; Corrie Decker, University of California at Davis; Elisabeth McMahon, Tulane University; Esper-

Ac k n ow l ed g m en ts

anza Brizuela-­Garcia, Montclair State University; Kwasi Konadu, Borough of Manhattan Community College; C. Cymone Fourshey, Susquehanna University; Lisa Lindsay, University of North Carolina; Emily Osborn, University of Chicago; and Sarah Zimmerman, University of Western Washington. Their teaching strategies and responses to frequent queries are cited throughout this book. I owe a deep debt of gratitude to my home institution, San Francisco State University, which continues to provide me the space and support to do this kind of work. The most important lessons I have learned come from my students at sf State, especially my former graduate students Lindsay Ehrisman, Brian Rutledge, Rachael Hill, Brian Griffith, and Jonathan Cole. I have also had the privilege of interacting with superb students at the University of New Orleans, Stellenbosch University, the University of the Western Cape, and Stanford University. Without the lessons I learned from interacting with these students, this book would be both dull and brief.

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4^ Introduction 64

This book is designed to guide university professors and high school teachers in the process either of building an African history course for the first time or of revising an existing course. It is also intended as a resource for world history instructors who want to integrate Africa more deeply into their courses. I imagine this book as one knot in the tapestry of conversations about curriculum design and course instruction that has been woven within the field of African history since its development. In these pages, I attempt to gather together the strands of these conversations by drawing on work produced over many years by teachers, researchers, and activists and then shared in the form of publications, syllabi, course material, and discussions. In addition to examining the patterns and meaning of these conversations, I have used this primer as a platform to suggest a number of possible points of departure for future work on content, course design, and pedagogy. Most important, however, I tried to assemble a book that will be immediately useful to anyone designing or revising their own courses. The result is not a manifesto. I do not argue for a particular approach to the teaching of the African past. I do, however, promote an intentional approach to course design and delivery that is heedful of the wisdom of our peers and conscious of the many opportunities and strategies available to the instructor. As a guide to course design, this primer is intended to func-

Introduction

tion not so much like an instruction manual or a compass; instead it is meant to be like a lukasa.

The Lukasa The lukasa is a tool that has historically been used by a large community of Central Africans to help steer their relationship to the past. Historians and other Western scholars tend to group this community under the name Luba (or BaLuba), representing both a linguistic commonality and a kingdom that existed in the east of the modern-­day Democratic Republic of Congo from the sixteenth century until the eve of colonialism. However, it is clear that Luba culture and language were historically associated with an area much larger than the Luba state. Some elements, including the lukasa, were adopted even beyond the frontiers of the principal Luba cultural and linguistic package and spread quite widely across Central Africa.1 Within Luba communities today, the lukasa is one of many tools for working with the past. Like English, the Luba language has a number of terms for thinking about historical events and experiences, some of which are related to regret or nostalgia, others to litigation, still others to teaching. Some of these terms clearly relate to communal memory, as they are tied to verbs whose meanings indicate discussion and relationships. Others seem to relate to personal attributes, suggesting that certain individuals have particularly good memories or specified roles as historians. A great deal of Luba vocabulary about the past is not spoken, but rather is manifested in physical objects. Thrones, staffs, scepters, necklaces, and even bodies are interpretations of the past, especially when used in ritual and entertainment. However, it is the wooden memory board, or lukasa, that is justifiably the best-­known Luba object of historical meaning. The form that the lukasa normally takes is described by the art historian Mary Nooter Roberts and the anthropologist Allen F. Roberts as “a flat, hand-­sized wooden object studded with beads and pins, or covered with incised or bas-­relief ideograms. During Mbudye rituals, a lukasa is used to teach neophytes sacred lore about culture heroes, clan migrations, and the introduction of sacred rule; to suggest the special positioning of activities and offices within the kingdom or inside a royal compound; and to order different office-­holders’ 2

Introduction

sacred prerogatives concerning contact with earth spirits and the exploitation of natural resources.”2 For the past several centuries, the lukasa have been largely the proprietary tools of professional Luba historians, the Mbudye court historians. These boards are in part a mnemonic device, meant to prompt memory and maintain the accuracy of stories about the past such as the exploits of heroes, founding of kingdoms, paths of migrations, and political struggles. The arrangement of beads of different colors and sizes and of carved signs in the boards conveys messages for those who can read them, with proximity, order, and design indicating relationships and transformations across space, time, categories, and associations. The lukasa thus functions as a type of historical text. However, the high-­level Mbudye historians who read the boards, usually in a public setting, are more than mere reciters of this text. They are also scholars who create the boards and they interpret the meaning encoded within them. As such, these historians do not seek to create a consensus history or espouse a single view of the past. Rather, their interpretive role is facilitated by the fact that lukasa are made in such a way as to permit multiple interpretations, despite sharing a standardized structure and vocabulary. Although the messages embedded within them are malleable, the lukasa still respond to flows of power within society, often reinforcing the legitimacy of long-­standing political dynasties and providing a focal point for community unity. Lukasa readings are shaped by the Mbudye scholars with a particular audience in mind, for they are often arguments for particular points of view or moments for the education of new members of a community. Such readings are often associated with music and dances, and the combined performances may be meant to encourage particular actions, to mourn a leader, or to express celebration and joy within the community. Because of their beauty, ritual nature, and association with a large state, lukasa became very popular during the colonial era among Western collectors and museums featuring African art. They fulfilled all of our submerged assumptions about Africa—simple in design, yet colorful and toy-­like, and unabashedly tribal in their primitive authenticity. They spoke to a strange otherness of spirit possession and chieftaincy from the heart of the dark 3

Introduction

continent. Only slowly did Western-­style historians of the Luba state, like Thomas Q. Reefe, begin to acknowledge lukasa as “memory aids” rather than just decorated objects.3 Over the past few decades, recognition of their utility has become a feature of museum didactics and art volumes. Yet despite these advances, we have still tended until recently still to see lukasa as objects far apart from the kinds of historical tools—like articles and books—that we create. It seems that lukasa could be the subjects of historical analysis, but could not be accepted as histories themselves. The main message of this book is related to the question of whether we should think and teach about the lukasa and Mbudye scholars as intrinsically different from the book and the academic historian, or if we can consider these two kinds of historical texts and knowledge workers in the same interpretive frame. I suppose I give my answer to this question simply by employing the concept of the lukasa as a map for this primer, although yours might be different. In the model I build here, each chapter serves the same function as a key feature on the lukasa, representing not so much a chronological point in time but rather a guide point to understanding the creation and curation of an African history course. Like the lukasa, this book is a navigation tool, if one suited to the structure of our field and our society rather than that of the Luba.

Structure of the Book The first two chapters explore the possibilities of designing an African history course in a way that approximates the Mbudye ideal—as an intentional act with specific aims—rather than as a sequence of lessons with the singular objective of communicating factual knowledge. In chapter 1, I suggest that we think about our audiences—our students—both in terms of what they bring to our classroom “performances” as well as the lessons we want them to take away. I focus on what students lack (something that is the frequent subject of conversation among instructors) and also what they bring with them that might be useful or important. With a sense of the contours of that discussion in hand, I propose in chapter 2 that we carefully investigate what we want our students to take away from the class. We may not be trying to build community unity or solidify the legitimacy of a ruler, but we 4

Introduction

do have objectives—moral, philosophical, intellectual, and material—and formally designing and recognizing these can help us in our course design. The second part of the book correlates to the process of constructing a lukasa. The chapters in this part are arranged around surface questions of space, time, and identity in much the same way as the beads and symbols are carefully located on a lukasa. In chapter 3, I investigate questions of space. I look at the approaches of instructors who use diasporic, global, continental, and sub-­Saharan African geographies of Africa and how their different decisions gave them and their students access to diverse narratives and themes that compose stories of the African past. Chapter 4 shifts to a focus on the dimension of time and the challenges and possibilities of periodizing and bridging the history of the longest-­occupied continent in the story of humanity. In chapter 5 we move to the lexicon of identity in order to explore ways to help students to approach critical concepts like gender, ethnicity, nation, and race. The intention of this chapter is to give students tools for thinking about how we have historically “known” Africans in the United States as well as the ways Africans have known each other. Finally, chapter 6 looks at ways to bring together these parameters of time, space, and identity to frame a course in terms of both coverage and uncoverage. The final part of the book maps to the lukasa performance. Over the course of this part, I propose opportunities that are specific to the African history classroom but that bear on broader questions for students on pathways to becoming historians, scholars, and citizens. Chapter 7 emphasizes the possibilities that are available by using the African history course to teach ethical scholarship and helping students to consider ethical frameworks as enduring lessons. Chapter 8 focuses on methodology and sources and investigates strategies for embedding skills and competencies into the course. These chapters include some discussion of the importance of “relevance” and “authenticity” to African history, but are more directed to the pedagogical opportunities offered by bringing diverse primary sources, theoretical works, and ethical considerations into our teaching. The issues addressed in each echo the question, introduced earlier, of whether to view the lukasa as artistic objects, sources for historians to analyze, or histories in and of themselves. Throughout this part of the book, we will look at the 5

Introduction

many types of texts produced by Africans—oral tradition, architecture, archaeology, linguistics, and more—and suggest the value of asking similar questions about them and about African voices in the classroom setting. The penultimate chapter zooms in on digital tools and resources as a way of delivering on these opportunities. This chapter emphasizes modern lukasa: With computers and the Internet, I seek to identify both scholarly tools useful in the classroom and elements of digital Africa, the high-­ tech, forward-­looking face of a continent that is dynamic and on the move. I also, however, investigate many of the Internet manifestations and applications about Africa for their usefulness and limitations for learning. This lesson segues into the final chapter, which focuses on the performance itself: course delivery, class activity, and assessment techniques that, hopefully, will help you to pull together the pieces of your course into a well-­ designed whole. Speaking of assessment, it is my hope that this primer will be useful to you in designing and curating your African history courses. In preparing this book, I studied every African history textbook and teaching resource that I could find. Many, but not all, are discussed in the chapters that follow. Because there was not enough space to share a broad survey of these teaching tools, I have chosen instead to directly address a particular textbook or resource only when I think it would be usefully employed to prepare or deliver a specific approach, course, or unit. You may well find texts that I have not described that work well for you. In addition to studying textbooks, I spoke or corresponded with many experts in the field in an attempt to embody in this volume some of the collective wisdom of the profession in which we work. I also presented versions of this work in several venues, including annual meetings of the African Studies Association, and received useful feedback in the process. I do not claim to have conducted any kind of scientific survey, of course. Instead, I participated in a loose but broad-­ranging conversation about pedagogy and curriculum. I would be the first to admit that one book cannot possibly capture the challenges of teaching African history or encompassing all of its opportunities. African history as a discipline may only go back about a half-­century, 6

Introduction

but the presence of humans in Africa goes back several millions of years. Thus, bridging the history of Africa and African history is a task that requires a great deal of thought. It is also one that brings with it a weight of responsibility, both to generations of Africans long past and alive today and also to our students. I would be glad to know how this book may have succeeded or failed you in meeting those responsibilities. Email me to tell me.

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%7 Part I &5

Conceiving a Student-­Centered Course

If you are reading this book, you are probably in the midst of designing a new course in African history. Alternately, you may be devising a world history course and you want the stories of Africa and Africans to be deeply embedded within it. Maybe you want to update or reconceptualize a course you have been teaching for years. Whatever your motivation, you are probably hoping to find strategies for building a successful, student-­centered class. Like you, I have tried to build the best possible learning experiences for my students. I work hard to design courses that will help students to achieve their intellectual and career goals, and I actively think about and try to study techniques for doing so. But like most of my peers, I went into the first African history courses I taught without any real training, and it showed. In these early classes, I merely struggled to make sure I was

Pa rt I

covering the events and trends in African history that seemed significant. I knew little about pedagogy or how to measure what students had learned, and I did not think a great deal about their cognitive maturation or what skills they were developing. Over time, as I began to learn more about my students and about the place of my courses in my departmental and university curricula, I started to take opportunities—usually in the summer or winter just before a semester began—to adapt bits and pieces of my courses to the needs of my students, of which I was becoming increasingly aware. At first the changes I made were limited and piecemeal. I suffered from the fact that I had never really been trained to be a teacher and had to start educating myself about pedagogy and curricula from scratch. I was also so busy trying to publish and to grade papers that it seemed impossible to do anything more. Over the last few years I have begun to learn about the possibilities of building courses around an intentional pedagogical framework and objectives and about the range of strategies that I can use to help students achieve those outcomes. In my conversations with colleagues, I found that this pattern is pretty common. Part I of this book is an attempt to help you profit from my mistakes and stumbles and also a reflection of what I have learned about classes and goals over the years. In the course-­design model that I have learned to pursue, I now begin by thinking about my audience (the students) as well as my obligation to my departmental curriculum and society more broadly. I try to translate these thoughts into goals for the course, then to consider how I will achieve those goals. Those processes find expression here, but most of the lessons in this part are also built on contributions from other instructors—our colleagues—and from students. I reached out for their input because I believe that we can become better at teaching and curriculum design as a community rather than as individuals. In fact, I hope this book will serve as a contribution to a wider community discussion from which we can all benefit. We do not all share the same goals, of course, and there is no single model for teaching an effective course in African history. I have tried to reflect the diversity of approaches as well as lessons that appear to be shared 10

C o n c ei v i n g a St u d en t- C ­ en t e r e d Co u r s e

by many of us. Hopefully, this combination will help you to frame your own model for teaching student-­centered African history courses. It may be beneficial to pause after you read the two chapters in part I and reflect on your own overarching goals for your course and pedagogical style before determining the scope and scale of the content of your course, the principal topic of part II.

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4^ Chapter One 64

A Place to Begin What Students Bring with Them

When I talk to my colleagues—whether they are high school teachers or college professors—about teaching African history, I find that we generally tend to share a loose set of goals for our courses. I think I can reasonably summarize these goals in four brief statements: We want to spark the curiosity of our students, train them to think critically about Africa and the world, give them access to the complex patterns of human interactions and the rich experiences of African individuals and societies, and help them make meaning of these brief glimpses into past lives. Each of us expresses these aspirations in our own way, filtered through our unique conceptions of African history and its place in the history major, the university, and the minds of our students. Many of us also have our own additional goals. Yet these four outcomes form a sort of consensus set of goals that typifies our field and acts as a starting point. How do you, as an instructor, begin to design a course to deliver on these aspirations? An early step—discussed in chapter 2—is the development of a set of specific course outcomes

C h a p t er O n e

that makes sense to you and addresses your students’ needs. Once you define these, you can then align your assignments, activities, and assessments to them, creating a seamless and well-­thought-­out whole. But the design of learning outcomes is not really your initial task. Instead, the first step I recommend, before you write even one student learning outcome, assign one reading, or design one assignment, is to study your students. Who are they? What do they bring with them to the class, and what do they not know or understand? What are their expectations for the course, and what are their goals? What are their learning styles and background knowledge? The answers to these questions will shape the design of your course, your delivery strategies, and the learning goals themselves. So they are a good place to start your course design. In this chapter, I look at the needs and opportunities afforded by our students by referencing three bodies of evidence: assignments and reflections collected from my students over the past sixteen years, responses from my fellow African history professors and instructors to queries about their students and teaching techniques, and secondary literature from the field of education as well as the disciplines of history and African studies. Aside from the first section of this chapter, I will not focus primarily on my own students, because your experience will differ somewhat from mine. Students’ needs and attributes vary based on the country and region in which you teach, the socioeconomic profile of your student body, and especially the mission of your institution. I expect that many of you are attached to urban comprehensive universities like San Francisco State, but some of you teach in historically black colleges and universities (hbcus), small liberal arts schools, community colleges, big public research universities, and high schools. Despite this diversity, I hope to be able to frame a conversation in this chapter that will be useful to anyone thinking about their students and how they— and the world in which they live—affect the design of your courses.

What Students Say They Bring with Them San Francisco State University, where I teach, is an urban comprehensive university with an educational and social justice mission and a diverse body of students, many of them first-­time students; even more of them are trans14

A P l ac e to B egi n

fers from community colleges. We attract a cross-­section from the state of California, with higher numbers of Asian Pacific Americans and Latino/ Latina students but fewer African-­American students than many of our fellow California state universities and certainly very few with direct exposure to Africa and its history. I also recently taught a few classes at Stanford University. The students in my African history courses there were generally quite diverse, and although many came from a higher socioeconomic stratum than my SF State students they too generally entered the class with little background knowledge or direct experience of Africa or Africans. But, of course, these composites say little about my students’ sense of themselves, what they bring with them, and what they want or need out of an African survey course. In search of a deeper understanding of who my students are, during the first week of every class I offer a range of activities that call for students to reflect and think about themselves and what they know about African history. In my methodology-­heavy “Approaches to the African Past” course, for example, I usually ask my students to do a free writing exercise on the first day entitled “What I Know about Africa.” This class tends to attract many anthropology and history majors, most of whom are juniors or seniors. In the past, I have had about one-­third African-­American students and a small number of Ethiopian-­born students in this class, but recently the course has begun to draw larger numbers of African-­born students, mostly from Nigeria. I give students no directions for this first assignment, except to ask them to take it seriously. This is a low-­stakes exercise: They get credit for completing the assignment, but it is not graded. Many students begin their response by stating their ignorance of the continent or admitting to their bias about the information they have. Answers often begin with variations of “What do I know about Africa? Not much!” Some students cite this lack of knowledge as an inspiration for joining the class. Yet despite their protestations, these essayists soon demonstrate that they do have some preconceptions about the continent and its people. Many students rather unabashedly state that Africa is “very tribal and primitive” or just that “[Africans] do things the same way as they have for millennia.” A few follow such observations with the recognition that 15

C h a p t er O n e

they are socially mediated rather than strictly accurate. One student recently wrote, “What I know about Africa is greatly skewed through a white Western lens. I do my best to resist and question these misconceptions, yet when I think of Africa, preconceived notions still stand out most strongly in my mind’s eye.” Such reflection is not uncommon. Some students do profess to know particular aspects of African history. Many of the episodes that are familiar to them are clearly drawn from high school and freshman world history courses they have taken. They include the Atlantic slave trade, the existence (but not much more) of the states of Ghana and Mali, and the end of apartheid in South Africa. Some students come with a slightly more in-depth knowledge of Pharaonic Egypt, either from having taken classes in the Africana studies department or just an interest in mythology. Students from science majors know something about human evolution, which they connect to African history. A few students have been inspired by novels, often Things Fall Apart.1 Others have read works of nonfiction such as King Leopold’s Ghost or have encountered broad surveys like Martin Meredith’s The Fortunes of Africa.2 Some are also driven to the class by music, usually by contemporary artists like Damien Marley, Nas, or Die Antwoord. Few of them actually name an African individual in their response, and if they do, more often than not that individual is Nelson Mandela. A large proportion of my students respond to the prompt by talking about their sense of social justice. They write about poverty, child labor and youth soldiers, aids/hiv, female genital mutilation, and a host of other problems about which they have heard. Kony 2012 has endured in students’ exercises for the last four years or so, and Cecil the Lion made a brief appearance alongside Ebola in many responses in 2015. Students give these concerns a historical dimension by noting that Africans have been victimized for centuries. Some express a deep-­seated desire to help Africans, although others are well aware that outside “help” has often been more of a hindrance for Africans. A few insistently write that, in fact, “Africa is not the basket case . . . that many people believe it to be.” A couple of responses each year express a heritage motivation through statements such as “I am an African-­American and I think it is time for me 16

A P l ac e to B egi n

to get educated on my history.” Sometimes this motivation is expressed in very personal terms. Usually I get a response from a student who writes something like “I am looking forward to learning . . . this semester; and bringing it home as a conversation piece with my dad, who does research of his own surrounding African history.” Some students write about their sense that Africans live very different lives from their own: for example, “I know that Africans have vastly different living styles. . . . Things that can easily be bought or obtained as an object are more valued in America; whereas in the African ideal/lifestyle, value is given to things you can’t necessarily own or buy.” Others, however, are insistent that Africans are “just like us.”

What Instructors Say about What Their Students Bring Students’ self-­appraisal of their knowledge of Africa closely mirrors instructors’ assessments of what their students bring to the African history classroom, or at least that is what my interactions with my peers tell me.3 Like their students, our colleagues often tend to start discussions and comments about the African history course by noting what their students lack. “The students bring to the classroom very little knowledge besides the common stereotypes and misconceptions,” one instructor wrote in response to questions I asked her by email. Another explained that her “students in general arrive with what I call a ‘History Channel’ view on History, and that is what they expect to study. What this means is that their interests lie primarily on American and European history and they see themselves as consumers of history, rather than as students and makers of historical narratives.” A third stated that she has “very few students who have been exposed—through home schooling or other types of parental involvement— to African or African-­American history. Most of the knowledge that my students have of the African continent comes to them through popular media, personal evidence or anecdotal experience related to mission trips or volunteer opportunities on the African continent.” Many instructors were as concerned with students’ preconceptions about Africa as they were their lack of knowledge about the continent 17

C h a p t er O n e

and its people. “The obvious misconceptions about Africa’s lack of development, social problems, etc., are always present,” stated one professor. They recognized that many of their students see Africa as alien and exotic, fundamentally outside the realm of the everyday. One instructor wrote, “Over the years what I have seen most is that students do not connect Africa to people. Maybe presidents or famous people (Nelson Mandela, Wangari Maathai) but somehow they do not think about the experiences of people in African countries as having parallels to their own experiences.” Our colleagues also often bemoan students’ lack of skills, for example, writing that students “struggle with the study of historiography and methodology. . . . They also have terrible understanding of geography and world history in general.” Despite starting from this position of “deficiency,” however, some instructors wrote or spoke to me about the great possibilities afforded by what their students do and do not bring with them. One professor wrote, “I believe that there are some real opportunities left by these gaps. The nature of African history exposes students to a diversity of ways in which history is studied and constructed, and African history is very reflective, always allowing readers and students to participate in the way in which evidence is evaluated and methods are chosen. There are also a lot of debates about historiography which I think are very useful for students. Finally, African history really helps students become more aware of the importance of geography and the environment in the development of human societies.” Most instructors with whom I have recently had conversations also recognize that their students have diverse backgrounds and motives that drive them to take an African history course. One celebrated the fact that her “students come with a desire to understand exploitation globally.” Our colleagues are especially motivated to take advantage of the diversity of students in their classrooms. One experienced professor noted that her classes often mix white students from upper-­middle-­class backgrounds and liberal inclinations with older continuing studies students from within the largely African-­American community in which her university is set. “The first group has more knowledge of Africa in terms of having read Things Fall Apart in high school and maybe experience in the continent,” 18

A P l ac e to B egi n

she writes, and such students have “been raised on Bono, Invisible Children and the development industry more broadly and they want to save Africa.” However, they “have a very hard time confronting the racism inherent in that notion.” By contrast, her continuing studies students “get that racism. And they appreciate . . . when I demonstrate that many of the same patterns in approaches to Africa can be found in the U.S.” Nevertheless, she stated, they often default to viewing Africa through a paradigm of African-­American studies. Alongside heritage learners, immigrants and children of immigrants from Africa also enrich the classroom. One instructor told me, “I always get a lot of students of immigrant backgrounds, also quite a few African-­ American students. . . . Conversations [about myths regarding Africa] tend to generate in them a lot of enthusiasm and engagement. In many cases, I try and make the story more personal for students, which is not all that difficult because their backgrounds often make it easier for them to relate to the issues we discuss.” In general, most instructors write that having students with different backgrounds and motives is an asset to the class. Disciplinary diversity can also help. One professor noted with satisfaction, “I often have majors in sciences, premed, or other fields who are searching for a set of material facts to help them interpret Africa’s past and present.” She recognized these students for the unusual sets of knowledge they bring to the classroom and for their ability to relate historical trends to contemporary issues. However, nonmajors also often find it more difficult to look at the continent and its people through historical paradigms. By contrast, history majors frequently “have a basic understanding” of the methodology and epistemology in a course, but often are not bringing these skills to bear on questions of contemporary relevance, a rare requirement in most history classes but one that is often important in our field.

Background Knowledge When I first began to teach African history, I took students’ protestations of ignorance about the continent at face value. Yet I quickly learned that nobody comes to the classroom with a tabula rasa. Students—even those who believe they know nothing about Africa—bring with them a wealth of 19

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knowledge, prior experiences, beliefs, conceptual frameworks, and ways of learning that shape how they approach the class. The political scientist Joel Samoff, at Stanford University, pretty well sums up the situation that we face when he writes that “the challenge is, of course, enormous since most students at U.S. universities know little about Africa; or rather most—while having strongly held opinions—have neither very conscious nor very visible understandings about Africa. Although on the first day of an introductory course on Africa most students will assert they ‘know nothing’ about Africa, in fact, terms like tribe and chief and stories about Zulu warriors will make perfect sense.”4 Designing a course to challenge these preconceptions is among the biggest difficulties of teaching African history. I recognize that the notion of teaching a course as a reaction to prejudices and presumptions seems like a negative undertaking. However, the fact that almost all of our students are familiar with some version of commonly held perceptions of Africa gives us an incredible opportunity to use our courses to train them to challenge conventional understandings of how the world works. We have the opportunity to teach them how to use evidence and historicization to critically assess their own and shared representations of Africa and Africans. By bringing students’ shared preconceptions of Africa into empirical and ethical consideration in our course design, we create an opportunity for students to learn to question their closely held beliefs. Moreover, the messages that students typically receive about Africa are really binaries of messages about our own society, our values, and our shared societal worldview. Bringing Africa into focus can thus help them to become better participants in a liberal education, more critical thinkers, and better-­educated citizens. Thus rather than pretending our students come with a blank slate or ignoring the shared, societal preconceptions of Africa in which they participate, many accomplished instructors recognize this background as an opportunity to give our students an important lifelong skill. An important early step in this skill development process, both for the instructor and the student, is the identification of the sites where tropes and representations of Africa are encountered. These might be long-­term sources such as news and television shows and documentaries about the 20

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continent, many of which focus on wildlife or poverty. Movies frequently crop up in discussions with students, although they also quickly fade. When I first began to teach, students usually mentioned Eddie Murphy’s Coming to America and Disney’s The Lion King, then some years later they referred to the thriller Tears of the Sun and Hotel Rwanda. More recently, students talk about Chappie and Invictus, although there are always some outliers who mention The Battle of Algiers or Casablanca. Some students also bring with them values and representations of Africa that emanate from their families and communities. African-­American students, for example, may bring a heritage perspective that includes individual or family research into the black experience and a personal relationship to Africanness. Often idiosyncratic and frequently Afrocentric, this background can help them to make valuable contributions to open discussions and critical investigations of the African past. The fastest growing population in many of our classrooms is composed of African-­born students or the children of immigrants from Africa. Their fellow students often turn to these individuals as sources of knowledge about Africa, but I have found that these students usually do not want to be token representatives of African perspectives. Moreover, while many of them who grew up in Africa studied their national histories, they often do not profess to have any in-depth knowledge about other regions of the continent. Nevertheless, their knowledge and experiences can be quite valuable for adding depth, flavor, and personal perspective in many cases. As noted, most students these days have also encountered Africa as an object of study in high school world history and world literature courses. The profundity and persistence of their exposure vary from state to state and institution to institution, of course, but most high school curricula include a few events and trends and even novels or primary sources from Africa’s past. Students may also have encountered visions of Africa on high school trips to museums, especially natural history museums in which Africans, Native Americans, and our Paleolithic ancestors are neatly placed within a premodern world. Some may have seen African objects in art museums, usually with minimal didactics or framing. Some students not born in Africa may also have firsthand experience 21

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of the continent. These may include family or personal trips in the form of tourism, hunting and safaris, or heritage pilgrimages. They may also include religious missions and work for charities or other nongovernmental organizations. These students bring some experiences to the course as well, and they are often willing to share them. Often, however, their encounters with Africans are fleeting and shaped by the realities of tourism or related industries.

Lacunae and Preconceptions As we have seen, many students are aware even before the course begins that they have absorbed socially mediated preconceptions of Africa, and can even identify these as caricatures or parodies. Others come to class blissfully unaware that they carry within themselves deep misconceptions. Both groups can benefit from an investigation of their common, shared representations of the continent. By naming these representations, they can begin to better interrogate them. Perhaps nowhere are misrepresentations of Africa better brought into question than in the Kenyan writer and journalist Binyavanga Wainaina’s famous 2008 essay “How to Write about Africa.” Wainaina wrote this brief essay as an email response to a special “Africa” edition of the journal Granta that he felt reduced the continent and its people to a series of simple, well-­ worn, and trite expressions. The editors subsequently invited him to write a full and contemplative response, but when he sat down to compose a formal essay, Wainaina could not find the right words. He finally chose just to give them a version of the original email he had sent in anger. The resulting now-­famous essay begins “Always use the word ‘Africa’ or ‘Darkness’ or ‘Safari’ in your title. Subtitles may include the words ‘Zanzibar,’ ‘Ma[a]sai,’ ‘Zulu,’ ‘Zambezi,’ ‘Congo,’ ‘Nile,’ ‘Big,’ ‘Sky,’ ‘Shadow,’ ‘Drum,’ ‘Sun’ or ‘Bygone.’ Also useful are words such as ‘Guerrillas,’ ‘Timeless,’ ‘Primordial’ and ‘Tribal.’ ” What Wainaina highlights so effectively is the manner in which Africans are commonly depicted as one-­dimensional—primitive and exotic, broken and backward, dependent, or occasionally mysterious and wise—in contrast to the complex and fully fleshed whites and personable and interesting 22

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animals that populate the continent. Africa itself is always “hot and dusty” or “hot and steamy.” The people are “naked warriors, loyal servants, diviners and seers . . . or corrupt politicians, polygamous travel-­g uides, and prostitutes.” Some African groups—the Zulu and Maasai—may be portrayed as noble savages, but others—Gikuyu or Igbo, for example—are money-­ grubbing and corrupt, or prey on the poor animals, who “must be treated as well rounded, complex characters” with, oddly, better family values than African people have. Whereas elephants and lions can be shown to have moments of everyday love, relaxation, and existence, African humans are depicted instead as lurching from one crisis to another. Africans are starving and need saving, but fortunately good-­looking, tough, heroic Westerners—safari-­suited conservationists and celebrity do-­gooders—can save them. These Westerners meet in exotic jungle bars and urban nightclubs, and they are liberal in that they “love” Africa and try to support the few good Africans—mostly Nelson Mandela. Usually, these depictions display a form of afro-­pessimism: the idea that there is something wrong with Africa that inevitably keeps it headed in the wrong direction. Occasionally, Africa is seen through a positive filter—as free, pure, wise, uncluttered—but even these frames do little but emphasize it as a site of difference. This last paragraph does not do justice to Wainaina’s beautiful and shocking essay, which you (and probably your students) should read in full.5 However, it serves to introduce the key concept that stretches across the pervasive narratives that most societies produce about Africa: that Africans are not “ordinary” people, but rather “other” and different from us. This is a distinction with which instructors struggle mightily and often throughout the course, especially at the beginning. We try to guide students to explore the messages about African difference that we all receive and internalize. Wainaina’s “How to Write about Africa” is one tool for this kind of exploration, but our colleagues also take unique approaches. Chris Saidi’s class, for example, watches and discusses a series of videos on YouTube including advertisements for Feed the Children, a short story on William of Malawi and his windmill, and the Rwandan president Paul Kagame calling on his fellow African leaders to reject aid packages.6 Other instructors turn to scholarly texts. Two that are frequently cited as particu23

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larly useful are Curtis Keim’s Mistaking Africa and Jonathan Reynolds’s “So Many Africas, So Little Time.”7 Reynolds’s brief article (discussed here) is useful for building a taxonomy of representations of Africa, while Keim’s volume (discussed in chapter 2) provides in-depth analyses of many of the origins and operations of these misconceptions.

Doing It: Student First-­Day Reflections One strategy for the first day of class, which I deploy in my “Modern Africa” course, is based on Reynolds’s model of four broad representations of Africa. As Reynolds writes, the first of these, “Primitive Africa,” is the most pervasive. It is within this model that we find the terms we usually hear associated with the continent: tribe, village, native, hut, warrior, cannibal, and witch. The societies in the primitive representation of Africa are all “traditional,” with Bushmen/San, Zulu, Maasai, and Asante as commonly cited examples. These societies are depicted as being strictly delineated and consanguineal. One cannot become a Zulu, unless one is a particularly dedicated and authentic white hunter or missionary. Certainly other Africans cannot just join these pristine, blood-­linked societies. These are somehow “authentic” African societies, whereas urban and detribalized Africa is not. This representation would have us believe that looking at these societies today gives us a window into Africa throughout history, maybe even into our own distant past. These Africans are different because they are primitive, whereas we are modern. While primitive Africa still survives in our Western conception of the continent, most Africans today are represented within the framework of “Broken Africa,” a place replete with famine, disease (especially hiv/ aids), military coups, and ignorance. These Africans have been damaged partly by our own meddling and also by their own backwardness. They are doomed to live like this forever, unless they can be saved by development, foreign aid, peacekeepers, and/or missionaries. These Africans are different because they are childlike and victims, whereas we are adults and agents of change. Fortunately, as bad and broken as most of the continent may seem to be, there is—within our shared representation of Africa—a small region 24

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that is alluring and magnificent to behold. This is “Safari Africa.” Populated by wild animals with hilarious and noble personalities, this Africa is almost perfectly untouched by humans. To be sure, some humans might pop up in the story. There are ancient hunter-­gatherers who are in balance with nature. There are wicked poachers who despoil it. There are dedicated guides who educate and inform visitors. This is a very masculine field of adventure for Westerners, and some of the Africans here possess nobility and authenticity, but they are different because they are part of the natural world, whereas we are part of the technological world. The other Africans with whom we can sympathize live in “Wise Africa,” a land of kinship and mysticism. These Africans live communalistic lives, sharing everything and using the whole village to raise a child. They are not as greedy and stressed as we are. Historically, most Africans lived lives like this until Europeans came. This Africa is now vanishing and hard to find, but a few older men and women still possess some of its mystical wisdom. We can applaud these Africans because they are unpolluted and wise, whereas we are stressed out and capitalistic. They are nevertheless still archetypes rather than fully fleshed-­out people. Such misrepresentations of Africa have amazing persistence in our society. Perhaps this is because they reflect pervasive and deep-­seated racist ideas, perhaps it is because they legitimize exploitation and safari tourism, or perhaps it is just because exoticism sells. After reading Reynolds’s article, I usually ask my students to think about and debate how we came to have these kinds of ideas about Africa, and what meaning they have for our own lives. This type of discussion seems to bring a new relevance to the exercise of naming our shared preconceptions and meta-­narratives about the continent and its people. Equally important, this exercise forms a great framework for later activities. I often ask students to reflect on these themes in writing. I do not formally evaluate or grade their responses, but I do take notes. I also bring the papers out again toward the end of the course, and I ask students to think about whether their ideas about Africa have changed, and how, or what particular lessons help them to evaluate and question each of the four representations. I also sometimes tie this exercise into a mid-­semester evaluation to see whether the class is achieving my objec25

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tives, or if I need to shift some material and make way for further reflection and discussion.

Conclusion This chapter is intended to be an introduction to a larger conversation about what students do—and do not—bring to classrooms. You may find that your students contrast somewhat from those described in these pages, but given the pervasiveness of tropes about Africa in our society, it is likely that you encounter many of the ideas and aspirations I have described. Understanding who your students are and what they desire and need can help you to design outcomes, lesson plans, and assessments that help them to achieve their aspirations and yours. In the next chapter, we will focus on the task of building on students’ expectations and backgrounds to help them to take away important lessons not only about the African past, but also about history more generally and the contemporary world in which we all live.

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Setting Goals Why Should Students Study African History?

We spent the last chapter looking at some evidence from both students and instructors about what students bring to our classes and what students hope to take away with them. The biggest theme that emerged from this evidence was our obligation to challenge preconceptions and collective narratives that exist about Africa early and repeatedly. Indeed, this discursive unpacking may be the foundational and most pervasive lesson an effective African history course can offer, as it not only provides an important entry point into course material, but also has broader repercussions for students’ academic trajectories and life skills. This kind of intervention is a pathway by which the African history course can serve as a critical intervention in students’ intellectual (and perhaps ethical) development, in the history major program, and in the curriculum of the university. It establishes the argument that the significance of African history is not to be found solely in its content, but rather in the profundity of the philosophical and ethical lessons students

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can take away from our courses and the ways they can apply them toward understanding the world in which they live. Admittedly, this is a pretty big aspiration to carve out for a survey course in African history, and not every instructor will want to pursue such a lofty goal. But even if you do not aim to design your course as an intervention in your students’ worldviews, it is still important to consider the role and purpose you do want it to play in the history discipline and major, in your university or school, and in the education of an informed citizenry. In the first three sections of this chapter, I try to provide entry points into this kind of deliberation from philosophical and pedagogical positions. I then apply these lessons to the task of determining student learning outcomes, a task that is foundational to effective course design. I also look at a few specific pedagogies and lesson plans that you may wish to use in operationalizing your philosophy and learning outcomes. Finally, I conclude by considering some counterarguments that suggest that African history instruction should focus on content and narratives, rather than on ambitious critical interventions.

African History in the Discipline and the Major Why do we teach African history? A few decades ago, any answer to this question would have required a proof that Africa had a history and that it was just as vibrant, glorious, and worthwhile as the history of Europe or North America. Fortunately, we no longer have to repeatedly engage in this kind of exercise. Moving beyond that point was a gift from an earlier generation of African scholars like A. Adu Boahen and Cheikh Anta Diop, whose work deeply informs the next couple of chapters. Instead, we can spend our time and energy discussing the nuances of the educational project on which we are employed and engaging our colleagues on the particular contributions our courses can make to a history curriculum. Arguably, African history plays a special role in the history discipline and in our major programs not just because it adds one more region to the global reach of historians but also because it offers opportunities to reshape and advance the profession. This critical role makes the history of Africa an extremely important part of any history major’s learning process. Learn28

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ing about the many different interpretations of the African past can help students to become aware of the way in which the production of history is a site of struggle. As far back as the initial exclusion of Africa from the realm of the historical by Georg Hegel and his peers, professional history has embodied bourgeois European conceptions, organizing principles, and text-­based methodologies. The histories of other societies have had to be pruned and squeezed to fit this model. Thus Jacques Depelchin appropriately asks whether history can have any meaning for Africans when its tools and narratives “are part and parcel of the relations of domination, which have characterized the historical contact between Africa and Europe for the past few centuries.”1 Yet Africans and Africanist scholars have effectively challenged the dominant model of historical research. The first professional historians of Africa in the 1950s and 1960s laid the groundwork for this decades-­long task by establishing Africa as within the historical realm. Some of these scholars worked at soon-­to-be independent colleges such as Ibadan (Nigeria) and Legon (Ghana). They were soon joined by the faculty of the earliest African studies program in the United States and Europe at Northwestern University and soon after at the University of Wisconsin and at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London. While many of these historians focused on establishing the content of African history, they also found that the language and theoretical framework of their discipline did not adequately explain the worlds of the past they were uncovering. They published critiques that inspired a second generation of African historians in the 1970s and 1980s to suggest different models and approaches to historical research appropriate to the societies they were studying. By the early 1990s, practitioners of African history had raised significant questions about history as a discipline, its claims to objectivity, and the methods that make it a cohesive field.2 These questions undercut the consensus of the discipline, with ramifications for many other fields. By developing new methodologies that used nonwritten sources, they helped to broaden the praxis of history. By reversing the century-­long exclusion of Africa from the realm of history, they raised suspicions about the exclusions and silences that still exist in the field. Finally, by generating evidence that 29

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Africans had possessed urbanism and various forms of extensive political organization, had altered the land to their needs, and had formed unique and highly diverse societies over long periods, historians of Africa identified profound problems with closely held narratives of a Europe-­driven history. Their work served as evidence that helped historians around the world to question how the human experiences of nonbourgeois, non-­European peoples have been alienated from their own context and appropriated to buttress or contrast assumedly universal or normative categories. Thus Kathleen Smythe, for example, can argue that the principal value of African history is its ability to take students to a very different place and time, not because Africans’ own pasts are so different and unique, but rather because “the discipline has had to forge a new path that has allowed it the freedom to construct narratives that are different from those of Western histories.”3 The field, Smythe contends, thus helps all historians to “rethink the assumptions and narratives that have undergirded” key global narratives. The different methodologies that we use and teach guide us to different questions and conclusions than our colleagues who study Europe and North America, or even other parts of the global south and east. The history major studying African history thus encounters the possibilities of a broader and richer conception of the discipline than they will find in many of their other courses. Not every student will embrace the opportunity, of course, but many of us have had that experience of running into a former student a year or so later who tells us how she has applied the critical tools we taught her to her U.S. or European history course. Having an impact like that beyond the classroom setting can be one of the most satisfying experiences we have as instructors.

African History and General Education African history also plays an important role in liberal education outside of the disciplinary setting. To begin, African history brings to a liberal education program the key benefit of exposing students to an alterity—a time, place, and worldview very different from their own. This is one of the most important functions of liberal education, an argument Africanists like Asa

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Hilliard have made for decades. In “Why We Must Pluralize the Curriculum,” Hilliard argued for the cultural pluralization of curricula, including the integration of Africa, for three reasons.4 First, he argued, a plural curriculum is more accurate, “for the simple fact is that human culture is the product of the struggles of all humanity, not the possession of a single racial or ethnic group.” Second, he proposed that a plural curriculum denaturalizes knowledge and promotes critical thinking, awakening students “to the fact that no academic content is neutral.” Finally, Hilliard contended that “respect for diversity is a hallmark of democracy” and hence a vital lesson for any student. The argument that African societies have matters and strategies of importance to teach the world—if we would only listen—has been made by African intellectuals for generations. I have a personal story about my own growing awareness of this fact. When I was just beginning my graduate study, I can remember reading the work of the early twentieth-­century Ghanaian philosopher J. E. Casely Hayford, who argued for self-­government in the British Gold Coast Colony. He went on to argue that Britain could, in fact, learn from the way that Ghanaians had solved the pressing problems of capitalist poverty. “We have no poor laws out here,” he wrote. “Every man or woman you meet claims connection with some family or others. And the members of a family share the fortunes or misfortunes of each other. Hence it is that we have no excessively rich men or the excessively poor. . . . We have, in the family system of the Fantis and Ashantis, the panacea for all the ills of the socialism of the present day.”5 Reading those words was a revelation for me. Before reading this eloquent statement I had encountered depictions of Africans only as deficient, learners, and supplicants, but Casely Hayford forced me to recognize that they could also serve as teachers and exemplars, thus rewiring my worldview in a single critical moment. Studying the African past cannot help but promote pluralism and an appreciation of the gifts other societies and people have to offer us. An African history course is partly an encounter with difference and diversity in social organizations, political institutions, aesthetic norms, worldviews, and understandings of the human body and spirit. Encountering

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such difference helps students to confront their own “bias” and ideologies and to strive to see the world through the eyes of other people, in the process acknowledging multiple positions and perspectives. At the same time, a well-­constructed African history course can also engage students in the universality of human experiences and the similarity of struggles to overcome challenges and take advantage of opportunities. Nor are these encounters abstract. Instead, I would argue that studying Africa brings students into direct engagement with the world we live in today. Although students tend to think of Africa as a discrete, isolated place, the continent and its people have been and continue to be enormously affected by globalization. Evidence of Africans’ long history of interaction with others and their cosmopolitan adaptations to a changing world stimulate thinking about the connectedness of the world and the global implications of the way we live. A good African history course can also substantially contribute to the teaching of critical thinking and problem solving. Precisely because of the role of the academy in the subjugation of Africa and the historic silencing of African forms of knowing and thinking, African epistemologies and ontologies have not been well integrated into the ways of knowing we use in academia and that students are taught in their youth. Empowering students to become aware of these alternatives can help them to break through their assumptions and to understand that there are many ways of viewing the past and present. In an increasingly multicentered world, students benefit dramatically from this kind of flexible thinking. African history courses are, moreover, emphatically interdisciplinary. It is immensely difficult to teach an African history course that does not engage oral history sources, archaeology, linguistic evidence, and more. Similarly, we draw for theory and methods from anthropology, political science, literary studies, and other disciplines. Our transcendence of disciplinarity, moreover, is not just notional but rather part of our practice. This applied interdisciplinary makes our courses especially useful in a general education setting because we can emphasize the stickiness and complexity of sources and methods, helping students to work and think across disciplinary silos. 32

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Finally, while we can argue that learning African history is valuable for anyone, the pluralization of any general education curriculum through the inclusion of African history is of particular relevance for students of African descent. Such courses recognize the importance of African heritage, bringing it in from the marginal location usually allotted to Africa. They also allow students of African descent to locate themselves within the general education pattern and attach themselves to it.

African History and the Educated Citizen Beyond purely curricular concerns, there are civic arguments for the broader propagation of knowledge of African history. If readers from other countries will forgive me, I will focus briefly on a U.S.-centered argument. Africa is immensely important to the United States, and Americans suffer severely for their ignorance of the continent and its peoples. African countries’ stability and peace are important factors in U.S. foreign policy and security strategies. The members of the growing African middle class are significant consumers of U.S. products, and the continents’ workers are producers of goods that Americans consume. The role of African workers and resources in the growth of economic competitors like China—now Africa’s largest trading partner—is central to the global realignment that is going on right now. Moreover, African history is an excellent mirror through which to ask questions about your own society. The production of race, colonial heritage, and the impact of capitalism are all issues that are illuminated by studying Africa’s recent past. For many students who find it difficult to see race and hierarchy through the noise of their own society, studying the operation of these structures in Africa can be a pathway toward recognizing how they operate in the United States. Of course, as instructors we have to be careful about making such connections and comparisons, because they have the potential to reduce Africans to mere figures in a national story. Nevertheless, carefully constructed lessons about the African past can help to develop U.S. citizens who are better equipped to understand their own society while still framing the societies Africans have built on their own terms. 33

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Designing Student Learning Outcomes I hope the last couple of sections have helped you to think about the enduring questions, knowledge, and skills you want your students to master. These may be specific to the course, related to the discipline, focused on liberal education, or even designed to help your students to become better citizens and people. For the purposes of building your course, you will want to work on translating these goals into clear and concise statements that you can share with your students. As you work your way through this book, I provide many opportunities for formulating specific goals around issues of enduring values, change and continuity over time, human perspective and experience, and competencies and skills. However, it makes sense to begin this process by thinking about goals that reflect the place of your African history course in the discipline, the university, and society. I have found that many of our colleagues embed these kinds of outcomes deep within the goals they set for their courses. For example, here is how Kwasi Konadu explained to me the outcomes he designed for his survey level courses: My foci in the lower level courses are skill acquisition and some development using the content, whereas the upper level courses are more about skill enhancement and mastery through the content as a basis for independent research, writing, thinking, and speaking competencies. I think African history courses, if they mirror the field, make unique contributions to students’ learning by offering (1) a range of methodologies for un/recovering the “past” and using the optics of the people on the ground to make sense of their times/places and movement; (2) global and comparative material using the worldwide African diasporas as both content and context for spatial, chronological, ecological, and topical inquiries; and (3) by offering students critical and creative thinking opportunities through global African innovations, technologies, and cultural-­spiritual understandings.

By framing his course within this particular set of goals, Konadu set up a course that introduces students to a set of methodologies appropri34

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ate to African history while contributing to a wider conceptualization of historical work than most courses in the discipline have. He proposes to give students a sense of Africa and Africans as shapers of the global past, reversing normative narratives that assign them marginal positions. Finally, he creates the potential for students to use African knowledge and worldviews to question their assumptions about not only the continent and its peoples, but also the broader world. This is a valuable set of outcomes that contributes to the history major, liberal education within the university, and citizens’ ongoing knowledge. Whatever goals you set, once formulated they will become the learning outcomes that you will use throughout the design process. Designing such student learning outcomes (slos) can easily become a bureaucratic exercise that produces dense, if earnest, jargon. This is not what you want at all. Instead, you want to produce road maps that you and your students can use. For that reason, student-­centered outcomes must focus on learning. These outcomes may describe the range of content knowledge, skills, and values or attitudes that shape the course. They may also explain how the course fits into the broader major or field of study. Perhaps most importantly, they should be measurable. Both you and your students should be able to assess whether the course has actually delivered on those outcomes, or if it needs to be revised to do so better in the future.6 We will return to the topic of learning outcomes in future chapters. For now, you may want to take the opportunity to jot down a few learning goals that match your sense of where you want your course to fit within the wider curriculum of your department, institution, and perhaps society.

Searching for an Effective Pedagogy Identifying a set of goals for your students is just the beginning of the process of building a student-­centered course. Whether or not you can deliver on these outcomes depends in large part on developing a suitable pedagogical strategy. This is not something that comes naturally, and unfortunately many of us get little training in pedagogy. I am no exception. As I wrote in the introduction to this section, my African history surveys largely developed through accretion over time, and I continually had to go back to 35

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reengineer them into something coherent. In the past few years, however, I finally found the time to build new African history courses—a “Gender in African History” class, a course on African historical methodology, and a course titled “History and Memory in Africa.” For these courses, I had the opportunity to think carefully about how to match my teaching style and approach to my goals for students’ learning. The results are three very different pedagogical styles. One course is built around weekly workshops, with lots of group work in class. Another pairs lectures with extensive readings and discussions. The third is seminar style and designed to lead students through the steps of developing a major project. In one case, I try to let students advance at their own rate, at least in the later weeks of the course, but in others we are all tightly tied together. Selecting a pedagogical design that matches the outcomes you want for your course takes quite a bit of work, especially if you have not had any formal training in how to teach. Fortunately, we do not have to start from scratch. There is a large body of literature about teaching that is worth engaging in during your course-­design process. Some of it focuses on developing a philosophy of pedagogy, including bell hooks’s very important Teaching to Transgress, a guide to teaching for the outcomes of democracy and justice.7 You may also find useful work specifically on history education, including the scholarship of Sam Wineburg at the Stanford History Education Group and Robert B. Bain at the University of Michigan, as well as the journal The History Teacher.8 There is not room here to go in depth into the general literature on teaching or even pedagogy in the discipline of history. But it is worth our time to explore some suggested pedagogies for African history and African studies courses. In particular, we should look at some proposed Africanist or transgressive teaching methodologies to be used in tandem with course content to dislocate students’ assumptions. You do not have to adapt any of their approaches wholesale, but they can each help you to think intentionally about the course design. The noted Canadian educator George Sefa Dei is one scholar who has suggested that we teach about Africa through a “transgressive” pedagogy that he feels is suited to the world we live in today.9 His proposed pedagogy 36

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is explicitly anticolonial and aimed at creating a classroom space within which critical African-­centered worldviews and knowledge can emerge. In Sefa Dei’s view, this model of teaching begins with an attempt to understand Africa from the perspectives and worldviews of Africans themselves. He argues that the key to challenging the essentialism of African difference is to share with students the complexity and nuance of African worldviews. Sefa Dei also emphasizes the importance of teaching relevant material— meaning material related both to the needs of Africans and to the goal of constructing students’ identities outside of what he sees as the dominant Euro-­American ideology and paradigms. He exhorts teachers to share with students relatable success stories about Africa and, wherever possible, to use Africans’ own voices when doing so. Yet he also warns about romanticizing Africa, emphasizing the need to teach critical analytical skills, especially with the aim of demonstrating that all knowledge is produced in a politicized and contested environment. In teaching about Africa’s past, specifically, Sefa Dei demands that historiography be both framed in terms of the Eurocentrism of knowledge production and teach the tools to counter it. He calls for African history classes to introduce oral history first and only introduce written and archaeological sources afterward. Students should be taught to interrogate how all of these sources are produced, he argues, and also how to interpret these histories themselves. Specifically, they should be taught to read sources to identify what is omitted, what is celebrated, who are the main actors, and who is marginalized. Having taught students to unpack stories and histories, however, he then suggests that a particular Africa-­centered history is important as an anticolonial tool because it emphasizes community, mutual interdependence, and responsibility, all of which go against the tide of the dominant colonial worldview that Sefa Dei contends is at the center of most pedagogies. Other theorists specifically argue that instructors adapt some elements of African pedagogical techniques into their African history courses. Milton Adams and Mejomo Coulibaly’s study of teaching in several parts of Africa is instructive in this regard, if a bit reductive and overly celebratory.10 Adams and Coulibaly believe they have located a shared “traditional” 37

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African pedagogy characterized by an emphasis on “social living” and an overriding concern for developing and maintaining social relationships. It also stresses a participatory acquisition of knowledge. The relationship between the teacher and students in these classes, they admit, tends to be hierarchical, but they also argue that this relationship is emotional and nurturing. Learning is integrative and interdisciplinary, and the instructor is expected to model what he or she wants the student to learn. Oral transmission of material is foremost, but students are also expected to help teach each other. One of the most interesting features of this approach is that each student advances by demonstrating mastery of a chunk of material, rather than by completion of a course or term. Your pedagogical approach may also benefit from a focus on the backgrounds, cultural situations, and needs of the students in the classroom. Beginning in the 1990s, the education professor Gloria Ladson-­Billings led the charge to create a “culturally relevant” pedagogy.11 Building on the work of scholars who had proposed techniques adapted to Hawaiian-­ American and Native American students, Ladson-­Billings proposed an approach to teaching African-­American students based on her study of particularly effective educators for these communities. She argued that teachers should recognize and be competent in students’ core cultural values and modes of expression, and she also called for teachers with a social justice emphasis. Picking up on bell hooks’s work, she also identified several particular traits of culturally relevant educators, including a belief that as teachers they are members of the same community as their students, that their students are members of a community of learners and capable of academic success, that students should be encouraged to learn collaboratively and take responsibility for each other, that knowledge should be viewed critically, and that assessment should be multifaceted and incorporate multiple forms of intelligence. Although Ladson-­Billings’s work focused on African-­American students, it was subsequently adapted to serve many marginalized student groups, and even theorized to be useful for all educators.12 How are these pedagogies useful to us as instructors of African history? We each have to make our own evaluation of their utility. Personally, I share 38

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with George Sefa Dei a belief in the value of firsthand African sources, a concern with threading the needle between romantic and dismissive evaluations of Africa, and an approach that embeds discussions of the relationship between knowledge and power as well as the tools to critically analyze narratives within each of the topics in the course. Ladson-­Billings’s call for a focus on social justice and a collaborative approach to learning also resonates with me, although not all of my students end up embracing either of these choices. I have a bit more trouble with Coulibaly and Adams’s notion of an African pedagogy. I am not entirely convinced that the pedagogy they de­ scribe really broadly represents teaching in Africa, and I am also not entirely comfortable with the affective but hierarchical relationship between teacher and student they describe. On the other hand, I have experimented a bit with allowing students to advance through classes based on their individual mastery of material, which both Coulibaly and Adams and also Thomas O’Toole claim to be African styles of pedagogy.13 I followed O’Toole’s 1970s experiments in this approach at Carnegie Mellon University. O’Toole structured a course into a set of units, which were then further divided into small modules. Students mostly worked on their own to complete each module, at which time they could move on to the next. I must admit that I encountered some difficulties with this model. O’Toole had in-class help—former students of the class acted as mentors. I do not have that luxury, however, and while some of my students thrived under the challenge, others had difficulty completing the course. I do not suggest that anyone adopt any of these pedagogical approaches wholesale. I certainly have not. I introduce them at this early stage because thinking about your pedagogical approach can help you to plan the classroom and digital resources you adopt, how you engineer student participation, how to choose the content for your course, and how to determine your assessment techniques. Each of these decisions may be shaped by the goals you are pursuing, but will also depend on a useful pedagogy. Will group projects help students to better grasp the lessons of the African past, for example, or is it important that outside readings convey African voices and firsthand experiences? Should the course be designed to focus around 39

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relevant contemporary issues and social justice concerns, or should it help students to view the African past in its own context? These kinds of questions can help transform a set of goals into a living course, and they are therefore decisive to designing the course that you want to deliver.

Doing It: Complicating Assumptions It should not surprise you to find out that the first goal of all of my African history courses is to help students to move from simple, discursive preconceptions about Africa to more complex and critical understandings of Africans’ lived experiences and created worlds. In speaking to colleagues who teach African history, I found that this kind of intervention was a common theme in their own course-­design processes. But how can we achieve this objective, given what students bring with them to the course? What kinds of pedagogy might help to deliver on this goal? As an example of one way to design around a learning outcome, I want to talk briefly about strategies for complicating students’ assumptions, focused in this case on the concept of a “tribe.” “Tribe” is, of course, just a word, but generations of semioticians and linguists have convinced us that words are important for not only the ideas they are intended to convey, but also the explicit and implicit meanings they deliver. Such meanings are not just constructed individually; they arise from the circulation of information and are then generally agreed upon. They change over time and in various contexts. Students sometimes do not understand the extent and limits of the power of words, and therefore they either try to outlaw certain terms or rebel against such efforts as “political correctness.” Our job as teachers, however, is not to forbid words but rather to help students plumb the depths of their meanings and the contexts of their production and circulation. There are many terms commonly applied to African history that are amenable to this kind of investigation. Often, the most powerful are tied to one or more of the four misrepresentations of Africa discussed in chapter 1. For example, students often think of Africans as “natives” who live in “villages,” as if they could not also dwell in cities or be migrants or visitors. Students are also familiar with depictions of Africans as implicitly “wise” 40

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but not as “intellectuals,” a word that is almost entirely alien from even the most positive popular descriptions of Africans. No word is more frequently and carelessly used to characterize Africans than “tribe.” In fact, the flippant use of this term by some students often leaves me wanting to just forbid the word from essays and assignments. But rather than close down the term, I learned to discuss it in a way that opens students’ thinking and perspectives. The basis of my approach is adopted from Curtis Keim’s Mistaking Africa, but I also used resources like the Africa Policy Information Center’s “Talking about ‘Tribe’ ” or Tolerance​ .org​’s “The Trouble with Tribe” with some success.14 These tools help students to understand the problematic history of the word “tribe” and how it has come to be synonymous with Africa. In my “Modern Africa” survey, I designed an approach to thinking critically about “tribe” that takes up one dedicated hour of class time early in the course but is then reinforced throughout. The first step is not to outlaw the word but rather to try to construct a useful definition of what a tribe is and then ask students to determine whether it is applicable in any situation. Usually, I try to come to this definition collectively. I ask students what they think a tribe is, and then we throw around some adjectives to see what sticks. I also ask them to look at different definitions of tribe. They are allowed to use Wikipedia in this activity, which is a rare treat for them, as the definition there is both useful and also eminently ripe for critique. Having developed a shared definition as if it were purely objective and neutral, I then familiarize the class with the troubling history of the word “tribe.” We focus on its association in the colonial period with primitiveness, irrationality, and rigid identity; and by extension we discover that colonialism helped to create tribes and tribalism. We explore the reasons why colonial administrators found the idea of a tribe useful, both in that it reduced Africans to the equivalent of primitive peoples from their own past—the Gauls or the Britons—and also that it organized them into rigid, permanent, and unbridgeable groups, each of which was the subject of a single chief and, therefore, easily ruled. In pursuit of the realization that the tribe is a socially constructed notion, I also introduce the mismatch between genetic data and tribal identi41

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fications. The evidence for this mismatch is summed up in “Genes, Tribes, and African History” by Scott MacEachern.15 MacEachern’s article attempts to fit together historians’ and cultural anthropologists’ interpretations of the African past with the new data being produced by geneticists. It is a useful article partly because it briefly lays out the differences between anthropological and biological understandings of race, but more because it demonstrates the misfit between named tribal identities and genetic relationships within those groups. In doing so, MacEachern demonstrates that “it is abundantly clear that many of the ‘tribes’ so beloved of (even modern) Western commentators are not entities preserved unchanged from ancient times but rather the relatively recent products of intense participation in regional networks of political, social, and economic interaction.” MacEachern gives specific examples that can be usefully adapted into lectures. The next step in my strategy is to help students to understand the ways that “tribe” is used or rejected in different parts of Africa today. Usually this analysis comes much later in the course, although I sometimes presage the topic in our initial discussions. One point through which this topic emerges is in readings and discussions about the contemporary history of Rwanda, especially the events of 1994. By this later point in the course, students are aware of the way that we tend to reflexively ethnicize events in Africa; however, many still come to this unit with a preconception that the 1994 genocide was the result of a timeless tribal struggle between BaHutu and BaTutsi. Fortunately, most textbooks now make the point that these ethnic categories were largely colonial constructions that had divided previously interspersed, intermarried communities into two rigid categories. Students still rightly ask if tribalism is not still a problem in Africa today, and we often end up debating whether postcolonial Africa may in fact have a “tribal” problem inherited from colonialism. But by looking at contemporary accounts of conflicts in South Sudan and elsewhere, students also pick up on the way that “tribe” is frequently used to render contemporary African societies intelligible to the Western public in a manner that confirms their timeless savagery and otherness. This course-­long trajectory means that I can only really evaluate whether students have learned to complicate assumptions about “tribe” and other 42

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allied terms through a culminating paper or final exam. I often ask students specifically, on the final, to reflect on the idea of “tribe” and to discuss whether its common usage fits the evidence of African history throughout the class. I also ask them to discuss why this term is used so frequently to describe African societies: Is it because it is somehow useful or authentic; does it reflect history in some way; is it easy for outsiders to use? This is an open-­ended question leaving students quite a lot of latitude, but a surprising number manage to make a successful argument that uses evidence from the course as well as shows mastery of the tangle of ethical, epistemological, and discursive issues involved in the way that we frame Africa in our society.

A Provocation This chapter is built around a vision of the African history course as a space for challenging students’ comfortable preconceptions and building their critical thinking around their major, their education, and their place in the world. But what if staging an intervention is not the only or main goal of your African history course? What if you do not necessarily believe your students will benefit from a transgressive, Africanist, or culturally relevant pedagogy? Or what if you, as an instructor, feel like these are important elements of the course, but that they do not really describe the principal objectives you are trying to help your students reach? One of my colleagues, a very thoughtful individual, responded to my questions about the objective of her courses by describing how she employs some of the pedagogical techniques described in this chapter. At the end of our conversation, though, she admitted that she sometimes wonders “what if I taught an African history course in which I wasn’t necessarily being so mindful of the myths and stereotypes, but just presented the information. What would that set of readings look like? What would that syllabus look like?” Her questions took me back to 2008, when I was on a Fulbright-­funded year that included jointly teaching a carefully conceived first-­year history course at the University of the Western Cape in South Africa. I was so taken by the approach, which pushed students to question both the authority of sources and language about Africa and that of the instructors themselves, that I described it to some colleagues at the 43

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University of KwaZulu-­Natal (ukzn). I suggested that this kind of approach seemed to me to be really important in a society emerging from an authoritarian past. But the folks at ukzn did not all agree. One, Keith Breckenridge, responded with the rejoinder that students who come to freshman history courses frequently know so little about the past that, more than anything, they needed to be exposed to content: what happened in the past and how we explain those events and trends. Only once they knew the broad outlines of historical processes and events could they begin to question their assumptions, interrogate their sources, and engage critically with accounts of the past. I have to admit that this point made me stop and think, because it had relevance for my own teaching. Most of my students, especially in the surveys, know so little about the African past. Should I more profitably spend my brief time with them by giving them the basic outlines of the past, and save the methodology, theory, and ethics for more advanced students? Would not just exposing them to this unexpected historical content be an equally valid way to stage an intervention? Lendol Calder makes a different argument about the importance of narrative in his award-­winning article “The Stories We Tell,” admittedly focused on the American history survey.16 Arguing that high school and college survey courses focus too much on critical thinking and skills development for early undergraduate students, Calder exhorts us to “give students facts. Teach them skills. Develop their mental habits. But above all else, teach the young to tell stories.” Calder begins his class by asking students to write a brief history of the United States, and he then works with them to identify broad narratives that are commonly produced about the country’s past. One of his findings, however, is that students have difficulty telling any stories at all; they cannot sort through data and produce a meaningful narrative that links facts and events over time. Arguing that such histories are among the most important outcomes of a history education, Calder finishes his essay by pointing out different ways to build narratives and story-­writing processes into the survey course. “The goal,” he argues, “is to prepare students for a lifetime of discernment in conversations touching on the meaning of American history.” Maybe focusing on the creation of

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narrative, rather than the unpacking of representations, would be a better approach to teaching African history, as well. It is impossible and inappropriate to ignore the arguments put forward by Breckenridge and Calder. They remind us of two very important points: that historical thinking is based on evidence, and that doing history is about creative narrative production as much as it is about critical deconstruction. I take their message very much to heart, and you probably should as well. In subsequent chapters, I try to fulfill the promise of teaching narrative construction and content knowledge as well as promoting the teaching of critical faculties in students. Yet there are two reasons why their arguments are placed here, in a provocation, rather than at the center of this chapter. The first reason is that as instructors we expect to deliver narratives and fact, and students in history courses expect to receive and participate in this kind of content. Focusing a course upon critical thinking and narrative deconstruction is both difficult and unexpected, and I think it requires more guidance and thought. The second, related, reason is that African history courses have the potential to play a key role in our discipline, in the history major, and in students’ lives as an intervention into their ways of thinking not only about Africa, but also about the global past and the contemporary world. We have the potential to use these unexpected histories to crack their assumptions wide open and to let in new light that stimulates their ability to ask questions about what they learn throughout their college education and beyond. Facts and narrative construction can aid students in this process, but our best tools are pedagogical approaches that promote critical thinking about the relationships between knowledge and power alongside the skills to critique preconceptions and discourse both in the classroom and throughout their lives.

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%7 Part II &5

Content and Design

The lukasa is the vehicle through which the Mbudye scholar articulates the story he has researched and conceived. Its design is meant to be supremely functional as well as aesthetic and translational. The demarcation of its surface and the positioning of its elements—bead, cowrie, carved design—define pathways for the story’s composition. They guide and remind the scholar of important concepts and the relationships of time, place, and the people and communities that make up the story. Ultimately, their placement shapes the performance of the history. The many different lukasa share a lexicon, but not identical contents or even syntax. Both the individual approach of the scholar and the need to introduce new ideas and messages drive Mbudye scholars to design unique and personalized lukasa. As instructors of African history, we generally aspire to something similar. We create courses that are familiar enough

Pa rt I I

in style and language to facilitate student learning, but distinct to our own approach and devised for the introduction of new materials and concepts. Each course is framed by a curricular scope that focuses on concepts, people, periods, and geographic spaces that we determine. We try to cover the stories we have demarcated in this way, helping students to understand them in their totality. Yet we also want to teach students to uncover the depths of the human experiences they contain and to use the complexities that are revealed in the course to ask new questions and propose innovative interpretations of the worlds about which they are learning. Building a course, like constructing a lukasa, is therefore an exercise in intentional design. Intentionality in this case describes not only an attitude of planning and preparation but also a practice of defining the boundaries and plotting the possibilities of the course. As should probably be obvious by now, I am a big proponent of the intentional approach to design. I find enormous satisfaction in the process of figuring out a set of learning goals for students, organizing the frame I will use to produce these lessons, and then designing multiformat learning units and assessments to deliver and appraise students’ progress. But that does not mean I ignore spontaneity and flexibility. Over the years, I have found that no matter how much I plan, each class has its own challenges and presents new opportunities. I try to be nimble and willing to pause the class to introduce resources, debates, and concepts that are not in the syllabus. Some of my best lesson plans—including many of the ideas described in this book—develop from a sudden, midcourse awareness that students need more depth, or an introduction to concepts I assumed they understood, or even discussion on a topic that has suddenly arisen in the news or from new research. But while a lesson may be ad hoc one year, if I am going to keep it I make sure that it is embedded in an intentional design for the next year, because I find that the design process is what gives overall meaning to the course and makes sure that students learn lessons effectively.

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4^ Chapter Three 64

Locating Africa Designing with Space

Because history is the study of changes and continuities, designing a history course requires the instructor to determine a time-­and-­space framework. This means not only determining a scope for the content of the class, but also structuring the course internally into units and building in connections across them. Such a framework can be tied to specific learning outcomes built around transformation and continuity over time and variations and commonalities across regions. This kind of intentional design will help you to set boundaries in the course and also provide the scaffolding for unfolding a narrative about people, their experiences, and their worldviews. In this chapter, I introduce such considerations by talking about the space of Africa and its relationship to geographies of the planet, the course, and the mind. Of course, most of the good ideas I share in this chapter are not really mine. Rather, they reflect the collective work of several generations of African historians, beginning with a group of scholars who developed a core resource of our field—the unesco General History of Africa (gha).

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No teacher of African history should be ignorant of the gha. It is more than merely a resource from which to draw readings and course content. Published mostly in the 1980s and 1990s with the goal of reversing the silencing of Africa’s history, the series was coordinated by a committee of thirty historians who represented a wide range of independent African countries. Together, its eight volumes—edited by luminaries like Cheikh Anta Diop, A. Adu Boahen, J. F. Ajayi, Bethwell Allan Ogot, and Joseph Ki-­Zerbo—probably did more to establish the validity and to define the shape of the field than any other project then or since. Among the standards that it established was a geographic frame for African history as the history of a continent. The directors largely rejected the idea of separating sub-­Saharan Africa from North Africa, except within the internal structure of a few early volumes. They also decided that a history of the continent should include Madagascar and the Indian Ocean islands off Africa’s coast. However, they generally chose not to include the stories of Africans overseas, including those of the Atlantic diaspora. This continental view of African history has largely been replicated but at times also challenged in the decades since the publication of the gha, and the questions it raises must form part of the consideration of any instructor designing an African history survey course. Even the gha itself may be in the process of changing to reflect this debate. In 2010, more than one hundred scholars met to propose updates to the gha. Their conclusions emphasized the need to explain connections between continental Africa and diasporic Africans across the Atlantic and around the world. They also called for an assessment of the unintentional and informal division between sub-­Saharan Africa and North Africa that resulted partly from the emphasis on the Nile River Valley and the Horn of Africa in early volumes, as well as the region-­by-­region internal structure of later parts of the project.1 These kinds of geographic issues have real implications for the way we teach and understand Africa, but they are only three among many questions related to space that we face. Africa is a vast continent that—unbeknownst to most of our students—is as big as China, India, the United States, and Europe put together. It is a continent with massive geographic and ecolog50

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ical diversity, one whose contemporary borders were imposed by outsiders and bear little relationship to historic boundaries and spatial conceptualizations. It is the continent from which humans first evolved and from which populations scattered around the world in waves—some voluntary, some forced. Finally, it is a continent that historians have often separated in our historic narratives into regions with discrete histories bearing little apparent relationship to each other, especially setting aside Ethiopia and North Africa. In our courses, therefore, we face the challenge of deciding not only how we will internally divide this vast and diverse continent into digestible pieces, but also how we will integrate each piece with the others and connect them to the rest of the world.

The African History “Tour” The most common way that textbooks and survey courses encompass the history of Africa in a single narrative, textbook, or course is by taking students on a “tour” that roams around the continent as it moves forward in time. This model, which was first featured in some of the earliest African history survey courses in the 1960s, is generally organized around large, visible states and grand events.2 The story as they told it commonly began hundreds of thousands (or even millions) of years ago with the emergence of humans in the Great Rift Valley. The next stage described was the emergence of the state in Egypt. The narrative then drifted upriver to Meroe, Kush, and eventually Aksumite Ethiopia before shifting to the Bantu migration or expansion, with the emergence of complex societies in West Africa as a possible prelude. This episode introduced a discussion of the emergence of Sudanic states, including but not limited to Ghana, Mali, and Songhay, which in turn segued into a description of state-­building covering the Horn and trunk of Africa. What usually followed was another series of stories focused on sub-­Saharan African interactions with the world: the slave trade for West Africa, the Swahili states (and Great Zimbabwe) for the eastern coast, the Ottoman Empire in the north, and then European settlement at the Cape of Good Hope. Overlapping these were sections on the expansion of Christianity and Islam, creating two additional (if moving) geographic “frontiers.” 51

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Together, these frontier narratives primed the pump for the final episode in the tour: European colonialism. This topic sometimes allowed the author or teacher to bring the entire continent under one thematic treatment. In other cases, they embarked on a new geography organized by colonial overlords: French Africa, British, Italian, German, and Portuguese. Later, the same geography frequently persisted in narratives of decolonization, although settler colonies in the north and south were separated out in some cases. Ethiopia was sometimes discarded, as it was difficult to fit into the mainstream African narrative at this point. Because many of these histories were written in the 1960s and 1970s, decolonization was usually the final chapter.3 A best-­selling contemporary African history textbook, Kevin Shillington’s History of Africa, updates the tour model to account for recent scholarship.4 Shillington’s human evolution story still focuses on the Rift Valley, but it also introduces readers to other sites of antiquity. There is still an Egypt chapter, but the Meroe and Kush chapter that might follow it also covers state building across North Africa. There is a chapter on the Bantu expansion that focuses on iron-­using technology and thus incorporates iron-­using African communities from throughout the continent. The normal rotation of focus in chapters on West, East, Central, Northeast, and southern Africa in every case covers more ground than in earlier textbooks, although remaining true to the original model. When the book reaches the sixteenth century, Shillington gives the Atlantic slave trade its own chapter. Colonialism is covered thematically, but decolonization is divided into geographic zones defined partly by imperial power—for example, British West Africa and Portuguese-­ruled Africa. Two thematic chapters on independent Africa are then followed by a final chapter divided internally by region. In many ways, there is nothing wrong with this “tour” model of African history. It focuses students’ attention on major stories and trends, and in recent incarnations still manages to achieve a measure of coverage. One could do a lot worse. Yet any instructor thinking about using this model should be aware that it gives primacy to several particular meta-­narratives. The first is the evolution of the state, for in each period attention shifts to new regions largely when recognizable political entities begin to emerge— 52

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Egypt/Kemet to Meroe/Kush to Aksum to Ghana/Mali to Kongo and Great Zimbabwe, for example. The second story is Africans’ interactions with non-­Africans. North Africa is a focus in the age of Mediterranean empires, East Africa with the growth of Swahili-­speaking states, West Africa during the Atlantic slave trade, and southern Africa with the arrival of European settlers. This model also tends to divide Africa into discrete regions in the era before colonialism and then deal with it as a single unit only once European rule takes hold, suggesting an outside catalyst for the development of a unified sense of Africanness. The African history tour is often subdivided through problematic boundaries. This geography means that some regions and groups appear only briefly, while other regions deemed peripheral—like Madagascar and the Atlantic diaspora—do not really figure at all. The problems represented by these issues suggests that we should also explore alternative ways of using geography in African history courses.

Defining and Dividing The process by which we name and define the space of Africa matters in any intentional course design. The simplest example is also one of the most revealing. Ask any student on the first day of your class to compare the size of Africa to that of Europe, and you receive a wide range of answers, most of which put Europe and Africa at about the same area. But, of course, Europe is really around a quarter the size of Africa (even less if you include Madagascar). The Mercator projection and centuries of Eurocentrism have lied to us, as the good people at Boston University’s Center for African Studies makes clear in their accessible and useful curricular unit “How Big Is Africa?”5 While it is vast, Africa at least seems to be easily defined, because the continent is almost completely surrounded by three bodies of water and hence is almost a world island. Yet in reality these bodies of water—the Red Sea and the Mediterranean especially—have long connected Africa to Arabia, the Levant, and southern Europe, rather than isolating it. Arguably, in fact, internal boundaries have as much significance as oceans in African history. The Sahara Desert, which for several important millennia was very difficult to cross, is a more significant boundary than the Medi53

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terranean. Does this suggest that sub-­Saharan Africa is a more integral region than Africa writ large? Should North Africa be seen as a place outside of Africa proper? In fact, the issue of how to divide Africa into comprehensible regions has long been the subject of scholarly attempts to digest the continent. Environmental considerations drive some of these schemes. So, for example, one might look at the societies connected by the Nile River—Egypt, Nubia/ Sudan, and even Ethiopia—as a cohesive unit. Another categorization scheme divides African regions into linguistic zones. Of course, language can legitimately be argued to be both a key source and a shaping factor in history. Teaching a course divided into linguistic units might be both interesting and authentically represent historical divisions, although an overarching narrative would have to be carefully devised. For the colonial era one can also divide Africa by the European empire that occupied each region. Similarly, for most of the postindependence period, Africa could be divided by nation-­state, or into groupings of nation-­states: for example, one-­party socialist states, authoritarian states, and liberal democracies. As noted, some of these states are vast, and certainly in other regions histories have long been broken down on a nation-­ state basis. Or perhaps we should follow the scheme of outlining broad regions using the cardinal points of the compass, as do the editors of later volumes of the gha. Ultimately, thinking about geographic organization is an important part of designing your class. A course must have some kind of organization, and space is an important parameter in your considerations. There is no perfect geographic model, unfortunately. Any organizational scheme is necessarily going to use categories that are at least partly constructed and produced. So you should not be ashamed to use a model that has limitations. Rather, I’m suggesting that you should know why you selected a particular model. Even more important, you might wish to let your students know that the geographical model before them is conditional and to explain to them why you chose that scheme. This kind of transparency will help them to understand the uses, and limitations, of geographies far beyond those employed in your class. 54

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Geography, Environment, and African History Africa’s geography is not merely a meta-­category for structuring a course. Rather, it is both the scene where the action takes place and an actor in the narrative you create in your course. Human relationships with their environments are important features of any history—hence the rise of environmental history as a field. This relationship is perhaps most obvious in Africa, our collective human homeland and the sole human-­occupied continent for much of our past, and it can be explored in class through a number of episodes and histories. To begin, most of human history takes place in Africa. It was here that Ardipithecus and Australopithecus first evolved probably five to six million and three to four million years ago, respectively. The first hominids evolved from these precursors probably about two and one-­half to three and one-­ half million years ago, spreading out to the rest of the world in a sequence of waves. Early humans, Homo sapiens, were evolved for survival at the frontier between the forests and plains of eastern Africa, and they developed their tool-­using capabilities there. In the more recent past, temperature fluctuations first turned the Sahara Desert into a grassland with a flourishing culture of pastoralists and then dried it up, driving its inhabitants into river valleys such as the Nile and the Niger. These became vital sites of innovation and experimentation in which complex societies emerged and from which cultural, nutritive, and technological packages moved out to other parts of Africa. Such movements were channeled by the enormously diverse African geography and changed to overcome challenges such as ecological banding—the system of east-­west bands of very different types of environments stretching across the width of the continent. These bands directed and inhibited the spread of humans, technologies, and cultures from north to south along the continental axis. Early African communities also developed to take advantage of Africa’s unique megafauna, some of which (like cattle) were easy to tame, while others (like elephants and zebra) were close to impossible to domesticate. Relatively high levels of disease and a relative paucity of easily domesticable crops were hurdles these societies faced, but the continent’s mineral wealth 55

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proved a boon for many of them. Meanwhile, Africa’s shape and location in the world meant that some regions—in the north and northeast—were closely tied to neighbors across small seas while others were long distances from the nearest landmasses. John Iliffe makes this human-­environment relationship the central organizing theme of his African history textbook Africans: The History of a Continent. Iliffe argues that Africans “are the frontiersmen who have colonized an especially hostile region of the world on behalf of the entire human race.”6 His chapters, each of which spans the entire continent, recurrently focus in on this theme. The Africans he describes have historically been engaged in spreading across the continent, constantly adapting to new environments, as they diversified into distinct communities. Their societies developed food-­production and metal-­using technologies slowly in difficult regions and faster in a few favored regions. They struggled with durable rocks, poor soils, intermittent rainfall, abundant insects, and disease. Their small populations adapted with extreme responsiveness to these challenges, using high levels of mobility and low levels of hierarchy to their advantage. Their social organization frequently favored maximizing fertility, and their political and economic systems emphasized control over people and livestock rather than land. Iliffe even pursues a variation of this theme for more recent periods in chapters that focus on demographic diminution and growth in the eras of the Atlantic slave trade, colonialism, and the recent past. Not all African history courses should be organized around Africans’ relationships to the continent’s geography and environment the way that Iliffe’s textbook is, but his work makes the case that this relationship is an important factor in African history and should not be ignored. Nevertheless, there is also a danger of overstressing or overdetermining the role of geography, climate, and environment in African social organization and thus falling victim to the Primitive Africa and Safari Africa representations. If you choose to emphasize human-­environmental relationships, it might be important to first confront students with debates about ecological determinism and the independence of culture from environment, rather than treating them as settled issues. 56

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Africa and the World From the early days of the development of our field, African history was connected to global history. African and world history developed in tandem, both with the goal of upsetting historical consensus, and Africanists immediately recognized that the continent’s history was tied into that of the Mediterranean, Atlantic, and Indian Oceans.7 Despite the richness of Africanists’ contributions to world history, however, most global history textbooks cover a limited range of events and trends from Africa’s pasts, and most often these are used to demonstrate narratives that are alienated from an African context. Africa figures into the story of human evolution, of course. Egypt, Kush/Meroe, Aksum, and Carthage are frequently cited as examples of ancient states. The continent and its people then fade into the background until new states can be described in the West African Sahel. Later, colonialism, decolonization, and the anti-­apartheid struggle are often used to support global narratives of democratization, modernization, and progress. Admittedly, world history texts are getting better and better in their treatment of Africa, but in most cases we still cannot rely on the world history course to properly introduce students to the space of Africa. By contrast, many African historians comprehensively address Africans’ interactions with other regions of the world in our African history surveys. These interactions are important parts of any accurate historical narrative of Africa and its people, and also they open up opportunities to explore key issues in African history. Egypt and the Maghreb’s centrality in the ancient and medieval Mediterranean world, for example, provides instructors and students with many opportunities for critical exploration, from the Black Athena debate and questions about the Egypt/Kemet-­Greece connection to Africans’ roles in Islamic (especially Kharjist) and Christian theology. The value of looking at East Africa in an Indian Ocean context has been ably demonstrated by Erik Gilbert, Thomas Spear, Derek Nurse, and others, especially in exploring the construction of cosmopolitan Swahili societies.8 Similarly, students can benefit from units that emphasize North Africa’s integration into the world system through work like that of Janet Abu-­Lughod or primary sources like Ibn Battuta’s account of his travels.9 57

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One global African frame that has received a great deal of attention is the African Atlantic, framed by works by both African historians like John Thornton and scholars from allied fields like the Afro-­Guyanese intellectual Paul Gilroy.10 The role of Africans in creating the Atlantic world is sometimes described in classes through a narrative focused almost exclusively on the Atlantic slave trade, and certainly students need to engage the history and experiences of this system. But there is a lot more for students to explore in the Atlantic diaspora, in terms of both cultural cosmopolitanism in West and Central Africa and also the memory and creativity of Africans retaining or creating cultures in the Americas. Colonialism brings with it several usable global frames as well. One of the most important of these is the shared colonial subjugation experienced by inhabitants of Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean, large parts of the Americas, and Australasia. Also, although students may be surprised to discover it, many twentieth-­century (and earlier) global liberation and civil rights movements were connected to each other, and these connections can be fruitfully explored. The opportunities are immense, but they cannot all be pursued, especially if you want to retain a focus on African societies and peoples. For that reason, globalizing your African history course requires careful consideration and design.

Doing It: Designing a Global African History Course Fortunately, a great deal of contemporary teaching material now exists to support a global-­intensive approach teaching African history. Erik Gilbert and Jonathan Reynolds’s Africa in World History: From Prehistory to the Present is a superior textbook for such a course.11 The authors begin their narrative with a geography and environment chapter that, unusually, features an additional section that compares the ecology and geomorphology of Africa to that of other continents. In the same vein, their interpretation of the Bantu migration/diffusion compares what we know about this experience to the mass movements of people in other parts of the world. Later chapters explore various African regions in transcontinental settings. Gilbert and Reynolds’s coverage of early Egypt, Carthage, and Ethiopia connects North Africa both to other parts of the continent and to Greece, Rome, Arabia, and the Mediterranean. The states of Northeast Africa are 58

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similarly placed in the context of a broader Christian world; and those of West, North, and then East Africa in the context of the formation of a broader Islamic world. The authors’ treatment of the Atlantic slave trade includes an emphasis on diasporic Africa and the black Atlantic. Once into the nineteenth century, their global approach allows for an even deeper thematic emphasis. Chapters investigate the experiences of Africans in the context of the rise of global capitalism, African contributions to the First and Second World Wars and the impact of these events upon their societies, and even African culture, music, and sports on the global stage. They neglect neither Pan-­Africanism nor the central place of Africa in the Cold War. In short, while they locate Africa at the center of the text and establish shared African experiences, they do so in a way that makes clear Africans’ long history of engagement with the wider world.12 One way to design an African history course with a global focus, therefore, is to use Gilbert and Reynolds’s work as a backbone. You could adopt either the entire book or a selection of chapters and build survey-­style lecture material around their content. However, you could then expand from the text by digging deep into particular topics that you think are interesting and important. At various points in this book, for example, I discuss ways to build thicker units around such topics as “classical Africa” (chapter 4) and the slave trade (chapters 6 and 7). You could also build comparative sections where you looked at such issues as race, class, and gender in African history (chapter 5) in comparison with other regions. There are, however, a few particular challenges to designing a course like this. The first is the need to avoid constantly reframing African experiences and structures for students in terms of European or American categories and events that will be more familiar to them. That kind of flattening reduces the opportunities for students to learn about African societies in their own right. Another challenge for the instructor of a global Africa course is to expand content beyond lessons that reinforce tropes about Africans as victims of outside states and corporations, a theme that is, of course, especially conspicuous for the past several centuries. You may also face the challenge of assessing whether you have truly developed a global African history course and whether students have mas59

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tered a sense of Africans’ interactions in the world. One possible evaluation tool is an assignment that asks students to consider the way that both global and local factors contributed to a major trend or event in African history. For example, I frequently ask students to write papers that look at the factors that shaped decolonization in the mid-­twentieth century. I expect them to be able to talk about the impact of the Second World War, the context of the Cold War, global decolonization and the rise of the United Nations, and shifting public opinion in Europe and the diversion of attention to the European Economic Community. I also require them to be able to discuss changing economic and cultural contexts within Africa and the growth of nationalism and Pan-­African/Pan-­Arab movements. I expect a strong paper to describe the ways in which these global and local factors were entangled in the spread of ideas, the demonstration effect of successful independence movements in Asia and other parts of Africa, the return of veterans, and more.

In or Out? South Africa, North Africa, Ethiopia, and Madagascar Gilbert and Reynolds present students and instructors with a continental definition of Africa with fuzzy boundaries that allows them to explore connections to the rest of the world, and they then build their narrative around those relationships. Theirs is a very inclusive model, and it is one that I think works well. Not all course designs are as broad, however. Specifically, some scholars and instructors choose not to integrate diasporic Africans or even certain regions of the continent into their narratives. I want to present some of these exclusions to you not only because they might influence the scope you choose for your course, but also because they highlight the importance of geography and the way it has influenced how historians think about the continent and its people. The southern tip of Africa is one seemingly distinct region. Apartheid-­ era histories of the region frequently placed it outside of the Bantu-­speaking world to the north and argued (incorrectly) that Nguni Bantu communities only arrived in the area at about the same time as Europeans, hence distinguishing it from “black” Africa. Geography seems at first to corrob60

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orate this view, since the climate at the Cape of Good Hope is hospitable to Eurasian crops like grapes and wheat rather than the millet and sorghum of tropical Africa. Historically, this weather pattern helped to facilitate the dense European settlement of the region and then apartheid policies, which also seem at first glance to have been distinct from the colonial policies of indirect rule to the north. This concept of a unique South Africa still exists today, from exchange students’ descriptions of Cape Town as “Africa 101” to the racially tinged ­xenophobia aimed by some South Africans at migrants from across the Limpopo. However, such a separation seems to ignore the evidence of connections and similarities between South Africa and the rest of the continent. This evidence points to a deep history of extensive interaction between Khoisan-­speaking communities and Bantu-­speaking immigrants far predating the arrival of Europeans. It also recasts the recent past by arguing that there was a close connection between apartheid and colonialism. This is a point that is made especially well by Mahmood Mamdani in Citizen and Subject.13 Rather than ignoring the question of South African exceptionalism, however, students can be introduced to it by being asked—as historians—to compare and contrast apartheid with colonialism in other parts of Africa, using chapters from Mamdani as a guide along with other resources like a unit from Michigan State University’s online Overcoming Apartheid project.14 At the other end of the continent, North Africa—Morocco, the Maghreb, and Egypt—is also sometimes relegated by Africanists to the history of the Middle East, the Islamic world, the “Ancient World,” or the Mediterranean. This division runs deep in the historians’ tradition. Unlike sub-­Saharan Africa, North Africa was seen by Georg Hegel and his colleagues to be within the “realm of history.” With its undeniable massive architectural, intellectual, and artistic achievements, Egypt (or Kemet) especially did not fit within modern Western conceptions of “tribal” Africa, and thus it was rendered not only non-­African but also “white.” The racialist evaluation of those who wished to divide Egypt (and Carthage) from Africa was met by an equally insistent evaluation by postindependence African scholars like Cheikh Anta Diop and Theophile Obenga, 61

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who sought to connect Egypt to Africa not only through language and culture but also on racial grounds. Thus students sometimes come to our classroom anxious to answer the question “were ancient Egyptians black?,” a question that is pertinent to our racialized American society today, but perhaps less useful for understanding the history of the region itself. The question, however, presents us with an opportunity to combine a lesson in historicization with a lesson in historical production. By bringing together works from Diop and Obenga (or more recently Ayi Kwei Armah) with critiques from Wyatt MacGaffey and source-­heavy readings like Donald Redford’s From Slave to Pharaoh, students can look at the way that both ancient Egyptians and our own society construct ideas about race, while using this topic as an entry point into understanding how Egypt was connected to other regions of Africa even in the distant past.15 African history textbooks tend to take very different approaches to the question of where to place North Africa’s past within African history. Some volumes, like Robert Collins and James Burns’s A History of Sub-­Saharan Africa, largely exclude North Africa in search of a more coherent narrative.16 Yet Collins and Burns do look at Egypt and its neighbors as precursors in their first chapter. Michael Brett’s Approaching African History takes the opposite approach, deeply integrating North African events and experiences throughout its chapters.17 Two other regions sometimes occupy only marginal positions in African history textbooks and courses. Africanists not trained in the history of Ethiopia sometimes have difficulty knowing what to do with its seemingly distinct Semitic heritage, connections across the Red Sea, and largely endogenous Christianity. Rarely excluded entirely, Ethiopia nevertheless sometimes enters the picture only as a pair of snapshots of ancient Aksum and the much more recent Battle of Adwa. Students are especially confused by the descriptions of the Ethiopian state as imperialist during the era in the partition of Africa, and by its own very brief period of formal colonial subjugation. It is easy to cast modern Ethiopia as an outlier or even counterexample to the rest of the continent. However, there are opportunities in Ethiopia’s story for students to witness shared African experiences as well.

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One of these is the way in which colonialism—despite its variations—had certain underlying themes and projects, whether for Ethiopians or for Africans elsewhere. One of the best sources for African perspectives on colonialism is, in fact, an Ethiopian source titled “When Satiety and Avarice Marry, Hunger Is Born,” expertly analyzed by Tim Carmichael. This parable of mice (Africans) and cats (Europeans) does not focus on the obvious colonial history of war and economic exploitation that students can see quite easily, but rather uses the distinct Ethiopian context to delve into issues of scientific experimentation, cultural hegemony, and informal resistance that are otherwise often lost in narratives of colonialism in Africa.18 A final region often seen as marginal to African history is Madagascar and its island neighbors. Easily integrated into modern histories that look at such themes as the rise of oceanic African communities like Swahili speakers, maritime slave trades, colonialism, and democratization. The early history of Madagascar nevertheless seems to place it quite separate from continental Africa. Yet useful comparisons can be made for even this era, and Malagasy distinctiveness can help to expand students’ sense of the richness and diversity of African origins and societies.

African Diasporas The concept of a historic African diaspora—a global community and identity based on common origins in Africa and shared experiences—builds on a history that includes Marcus Garvey’s Back to Africa movement, Christian Ethiopianism, the Pan-­Africanism of the interwar and postwar years, and Black Nationalist movements of the 1960s and 1970s, as well as intellectual programs like negritude and Afrocentrism. For this reason, course elements that bring in diasporic Africa can easily focus on contemporary issues such as the shared marginalization of African and African-­descended people based on imperialist and racist ideologies and the nature of the bond shared by people of African descent around the world today. Yet Africa’s diasporas go much further back in time. Historically, diasporic Africa could be said to begin as early as the first movements of Homo sapiens out of Africa sometime between 130,000 and 200,000 years ago. However, in

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common usage the term “African diaspora” generally refers at least as far back as the mass movement of Africans into the Atlantic and—to some degree—the Indian Ocean worlds in the recent past. Through the movement of peoples that came to define the Atlantic and Indian Ocean world, Africans became prominent as both involuntary and voluntary settlers, merchants, sailors, healers, and leaders in Asia and the Americas. In the process, the category of “African” was reconceptualized and in some cases radically re-­created through the imposition of racial logic and through the continual renegotiation of identities. African cultural elements survived, were creolized, and were re-­created in the Americas and elsewhere. For Africans of the diaspora, long separated and sometimes even cut off from Africa, the idea of a homeland sometimes took on an immense importance. Hence, for example, we have the rise of “Ethiopian” churches and movements in the Americas looking back to the continent for inspiration and leadership. The shared hardships that characterized colonialism, slavery, racism, and economic exploitation helped to draw overseas and continental Africans together at times. Yet the racial and continental Pan-­ African paradigms sometimes clashed, especially after the Second World War when African nationalist leaders sometimes emphasized continental problems at the expense of solidarity with diasporic Africans.

Conclusion To what degree should the elements of diasporic African history be considered in the African history classroom? Can the scope of the African history class be thrown wide enough to encompass the history of the African diaspora, or should it be fixed more tightly on the continent? Will including the diaspora mean that your course infringes on the turf of other scholars or other departments, and does that matter? Possibly, this kind of expansiveness will make the course more pressingly relevant for some students. Yet it could also introduce an incoherence if not done carefully. One way to avoid such an incoherence is to design questions of space into the course from the beginning and to include them in your learning outcomes. For example, consider writing learning outcomes that include critical engagement with the geography of Africa and Africans, such as the following: 64

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4 Students should be able to assess the role of the environment and Africans’ attempts to coexist with or master their environment as elements in African history. 4 Students will be able to compare and contrast the operation of colonialism in different parts of Africa, including settler states like South Africa and Algeria and under different empires. 4 Students should be able to construct a definition of the Black Atlantic and describe the connections over time between diasporic and continental Africans.

Possibly you can make your class an even more significant learning experience by introducing meta-­issues like the geographic space of Africa. For example:

4 Students should be able to identify and evaluate historic arguments for teaching North Africa separately from, or together with, sub-­Saharan Africa.

Sharing with students these considerations about space and geography may guide them to construct critical considerations of assumptions and narratives about Africa. These lessons may be just as important as the course content itself.

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4^ Chapter Four 64

When Was Africa? Designing with Time

Just as defining the geographic scope and organization of your course can create both challenges and opportunities, chronologies and time can also introduce complexities to your class that, although they may impose additional burdens on both you and your students, have the potential of introducing them to profound and meaningful lessons about making meaning from the past. In this chapter, I focus on two strategies—periodizing and bridging—for dealing with time in your course. In the first section, I suggest some advantages of periodization in African history and look at a variety of schemes for periodizing our courses. In the second section, I focus on the limitations and problems of periodization and propose building bridges across periods as a way to deal with some of these. The final section contains a case study for periodizing the second “half ” of the survey sequence: the modern African history course. I will loop back to look at the first half of the survey in chapter 6.

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Making Time Periodization is generally understood to be the process of dividing the past into discrete, named periods based on some assumedly important transformation or change that distinguishes each from the others. In reality, of course, neither humans nor environments are predisposed to cooperate with our periodization schemes. There are hardly ever clean, decisive breaks between one period and another. Rather we commonly see messy, complicated, and uneven transitions from one situation or state to another. Moreover, as I indicated in the last chapter, space and time interact in complex ways. Transformational processes and events in one region of a vast conti­ nent like Africa may or may not synchronize with similar changes elsewhere, and they may not even happen at all in some areas. Nevertheless, historians mark time into divisions as part of our interpretive process. These divisions usually make sense to us in hindsight and from our modern vantage point, but often they would not have made sense to those who lived in the societies we study. In fact, while as historians we tend to exclusively use chronological pathways in our narratives, some of the societies we study—especially in earlier periods—told stories about the past without strict chronologies or through alternate organizational schemes. This disjunction has led some scholars to criticize the pursuit of periodization entirely. Steve Feierman, always a provocative scholar, has gone so far as to suggest that periodization renders some Africans’ histories invisible by creating false boundaries at which narratives begin and end, when in fact human experiences have always transgressed those boundaries.1 Instead of periodizing, Feierman calls for us to produce “macro-­histories” that do not rely on firm chronological schemes but rather engage themes running across long periods of history. Nick Creary too has urged us to throw away our chronological binaries like “precolonial” and “colonial” in pursuit of chronologies more authentic—in other words self-­created, recognizable, and familiar—to the African societies of the past that we study. Yet teaching thematic histories that are not anchored to decisive moments or translatable transformations can be very difficult. Most of the stu-

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dents who come to our classroom know even less about the operation of time in African history than they do about the continent’s geography. I have sometimes felt like I need to start the class with a timeline exercise as well as a map exercise, just so I do not get essays about the new imperialism of the late nineteenth century that cite evidence from the era of the Atlantic slave trade, or assignments that make contemporaries of Pharaonic Egypt/ Kemet and the Kongo Confederation. But this does not mean that I think we should lazily adopt conventional periodizations. Just as we should probably be intentional about the way that we divide and determine the spaces of Africa, we can think carefully about our schemes for assigning and using time in African history. In fact, periodization can be part of our intervention into our students’ discursive worlds, as we help them to rethink such problematic categories as “prehistory” and “postcolonial.”

Models for Periodizing Your Course One way to get students to think about periodization is to introduce into the course a history of how historians have periodized Africa, the world, and their relationships to each other. Some students will already be familiar with the conventional, long-­established scheme by which world history is divided into prehistoric, ancient, classical, medieval, early modern, modern, and contemporary periods. This organization pattern is so widespread that it seems almost natural, but we can help them understand that it is in fact derived from a retrospective view of Europe’s past that was then thoughtlessly (or violently) extended to other regions of the world. In our own classrooms, African history has conventionally been divided into three broad periods, much more heavily weighted toward the contemporary past: the precolonial, colonial, and postcolonial eras. Traditionally, African history surveys have also been divided into two quarter-­long or three semester-­long courses, with quarter schools assigning one class to each of these periods and semester schools placing the precolonial in one half and the colonial and postcolonial in the other. This division dates back as far as some of the earliest survey courses in the field. For example, in 1963, before many African history textbooks had been written, Robert

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Rotberg proposed a model for the organization of a two-­semester survey course divided at around 1885. It was weighted toward the modern era, a decision justified, according to Rotberg, by “the impact and importance of the colonial experience.”2 This scheme is still often used and is characterized by a number of conventional features. The first is the marginalization of “prehistory” to a brief introduction within state-­centered precolonial history courses. A second is the appropriation of European labels such as “medieval” to describe periods in the African past. Yet another is the elevation of European intervention, and particularly the imposition of formal colonialism, to the level of a decisive moment in African history. Together, these three features typify the traditional periodization of African history, one in which Africa is fit into a global frame originally developed to serve the needs of its colonizers. Fortunately, newer attempts to put Africa and the world into a common frame tend to be much more responsive to contemporary research directions that emphasize African experiences and that use sources that allow for the historicization of the deeper past. Most of these models trace a number of internal changes and continuities across one or several themes. These might include demography, technology, social and political organization, economics, and interactions among societies and with the environment. Demography is one theme through which we can build courses that de­fine Africa’s past through significant transformations. A population-­ driven course periodization, possibly built around John Iliffe’s Africans, could follow demographic trends beginning with the evolution and spread of humans throughout the continent. Important transitions might include large-­scale movements and cultural transitions like the Bantu diffusion, technologies that allowed for higher population densities in the distant and recent past, and catastrophes like the Atlantic slaving system. Such an organizational model could be tied to changes in sociopolitical organization to maximize or regulate fertility, although there is a risk of determinism in these connections.3 Any demographic history of Africans will inevitably also tie in to a history of technology as well. The impacts of food production, sedentarization, and the adoption and spread of iron technology both complicate and 70

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help to frame change over time in Africa. Not only are these lengthy and complex processes that stretched through African history, they were also asynchronous but connected in different regions. A narrative that uses time and space together to tell the story of the people who shared and adapted these technologies in different regions can thus help to knit the continent together for students. A history framed by technology can provide routes into all kinds of topics, not only those that are obvious—like the conquest and administration of Africa under well-­armed and industrialized Europeans—but also those that are not, such as the emergence of the shrine as a religious technology and a site for social organization and healing. Debates surrounding technology, especially the importation and spread of iron technology in different regions, can be good introductions to the use of sources to define periods of the African past. For example, the “colonial” era of written sources in European languages is closely tied to such technologies as firearms, railroads, telegraphs, and bureaucratization. Of course, there is also a danger in using sources to define periods. Because we rely on written texts so much, for example, we tend to start new periods when new genres of written sources emerge. Thus it is easy to talk about an “Islamic East Africa” emerging at the date when we see Arabic writing for the first time, or to begin a new era in West African history when European sailors’ reports begin to emerge. Yet often these are frequently events that take place in the midst of other, longer, and possibly more important transformations that the arrival of new types of sources could obscure. Another way to periodize regional—and sometimes continental— African history is to chart changes in linguistic and ethnic identification. Certainly, changes in language and identity indicate major trends in ­Africa’s past. An obvious example of this is the Bantu expansion (or diffusion), which arguably deserves quite a lot of attention in an African history survey. The spread of Bantu cultural and technological packages through the trunk of Africa was clearly an enormous and transformational process. Yet speaking of a Bantu “era” for Africa, while framing a long and important process, can sloppily replace complex local histories of interaction between immigrants and locals with the image of a vast wave of invaders crossing the continent. Indeed, any ethnic/linguistic model of periodization raises 71

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challenges even as it provides milestones for students to hang on to. Imagine trying to use Islam or Islamicization as a watershed event for West Africa. At what date does West Africa become “Muslim”? When the first Muslim Berbers make the transit across the Sahara? When the kings of Sahelian states became converts, or only in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries with the wave of Sufi brotherhoods among pastoralists and then peasants? The difficulties of using perceived identity shifts to build schemes for periodization are equally complex for courses that focus on African interactions with the outside world. Traditionally, five important sets of intercontinental interactions have been key markers in periodizing the continent. The first is the interaction between North and Northeast Africans and other Mediterranean societies beginning about 2500 bce or even earlier. This history has helped to frame a notion of a classical or antique Africa, buttressing the idea of North Africa as separate from sub-­Saharan Africa and more closely tied to Greece, Rome, the Levant, and Mesopotamia. The second marker is the large-­scale interaction across the Mediterranean, Red Sea, and the Indian Ocean, primarily with Muslim states and peoples, beginning around 670 ce. Three further frequently used inflection points all have to do with Africans’ relationships with Europeans in the context of globalization: the emergence and spread of the Atlantic slaving system, formal colonialism, and decolonization. Seemingly fortuitously, these three experiences all have global as well as African significance. The problem with this framework is that so many important stories seem to cross the points marked in bold on the timeline. African interaction across the Mediterranean does not end after the Roman era, despite what many textbooks seem to suggest. Indigenous social and political systems continue well into any conceived Islamic era (and in fact Islam was historically Africanized as much as Africa was Islamicized) over long periods of time. Similarly, although colonialism marks a pretty dramatic dislocation in many respects, Feierman correctly points out that many important stories—including health and healing—are better told across that boundary rather than on either side of it. Finally, political decolonization did not strip away the influence of colonial political systems in Africa, let alone economics of culture. 72

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Building Bridges Arguably, major events and transformations can only be represented accurately in the classroom if the instructor acknowledges continuities across them. For example, the development of the kinds of large-­scale societies governed by interlocking institutions that we refer to as states (focusing on governance) or complex societies (focusing on social intricacy) is a massive transformation for any population. Yet this type of transformation often disguises major cultural and even political continuities, including the amazing resilience of the (consanguineal and adoptive) extended family as a political and economic unit through a variety of regimes in many parts of Africa. Another example of the way that periodization can erase important continuities involves the frequently used watershed of “decolonization,” usually focused on the 1950s to the 1970s. Again, one can argue that this kind of political decolonization is just one episode in a long history of African resistance to colonial rule. One of the titans of the first generation of formally trained African historians, A. Adu Boahen, has instead proposed an alternate periodization of decolonization built around patterns of resistance. He divides this history in 1935, arguing that resistance prior to this date focusing more on retaining preexisting political and social structures, whereas after 1935 a nationalist phase emerges with all of the features of nationalist political movements.4 Similarly, Frederick Cooper, in his excellent textbook Africa since 1940, makes an impassioned argument for rejecting political decolonization as a dividing line. Instead he designs a profound lesson connecting the opportunities, constraints, and ultimately choices of the late colonial era to the experience of postcolonial Africa.5 Helping students to see continuities across periods is one kind of bridging we can encourage as instructors. Another is to connect understandable themes and chronologies that are useful in the classroom to authentic histories: histories that would be recognizable to people who lived through them. Joseph Ki-­Zerbo recognized this problem in his introduction to the unesco General History of Africa series, arguing that “it is very important that the whole course of the historical process should be reintegrated 73

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into the context of African time.” Ki-­Zerbo cites a number of examples of “African time”—the movement of celestial bodies (like the moon and sun) and seasonal constellations, the seasonality of rain and drying, and the migrations of people and animals. Others include the recognition of the authority of the aged and the ancestors, the coronation of rulers, and changes in social organizational structures.6 In many cases, adjusting to these temporal systems is not difficult so much as it raises deep epistemological issues. For example, many African societies in the past reckoned time at least partly through king lists in which accessions represented milestones. These king lists may be adopted somewhat for teaching specific, local narratives. For example, in one of my classes I teach a two-­class lesson on the destruction of the Zulu kingdom, based on a course taught at the University of the Western Cape in South Africa. Using mainly oral sources, I divide this story by the reigns of four kings stretching from Shaka kaSenzangakhona to Cetshwayo kaMpande. Admittedly, these kings ruled in the nineteenth century, and it is relatively easy to confirm the timing of their reigns with colonial British sources. Deeper in the past, king lists are more difficult to “verify” and are often as much mythical as historical. Lessons built around these king lists might effectively focus more around broader social transformations than precise chronologies of events.

Doing It: Periodizing and Bridging a Modern African History Course A major challenge for teaching the more recent “half ” of the African history survey is finding patterns within the vast array of data for this era. Underlying this problem is the issue of whether and to what degree this course should seek to be relevant. Stephen Ellis poses this question when he suggests that figuring out “which aspects of the present are of prime importance” is the “first task of a historian of the contemporary world.”7 For Ellis, it is a short leap from identifying present concerns to pulling out patterns from the recent African past that can form the basis of his course.

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Following Ellis, I redesign my own “Modern Africa” course periodically by considering whether there are current issues that year that need to be contextualized for students through historical narrative. I try not to let the present overwhelm the past, but I allow it to guide some of my choices, including when to begin the course. Recently, I allowed myself to be guided by Walter Rodney’s arguments that the roots of contemporary African economics have some basis in colonialism and the Atlantic slaving system.8 For this reason, while I originally began my “Modern Africa” course with formal colonialism (1870s), over time I have pushed the first unit backward to begin with global industrial capitalism and the deindustrialization of African economies (1800) and more recently to the height of the Atlantic slaving system (seventeenth century). Last year, however, I found that this emphasis on the impact of global trends resulted in a course whose first unit portrays Africans more as victims than actors. So now, while I still begin the course before the nineteenth century, I try to make sure that this “development of underdevelopment” is not the only opening story. I now start with a series of seventeenth- and eighteenth-­century stories on the human level, only one of which focuses on slaving. In doing so, I try to present a narrative of a “cosmopolitan,” moving, diverse African continent prior to the colonial period.9 I am not the only one to reject the 1880s as the right date at which to start a course about modern African history. Elisabeth McMahon, for example, writes, “I hate that time division because it then focuses the class on western engagement with Africa rather than thinking about African engagement within the continent and with non-­African groups. [Instead], I use 1800 as a sort of easy marker. I talk about the jihads in Western Africa; expansion of the Omanis into eastern Africa and state-­building in central and southern Africa; ending of the Atlantic slave trade. These all happen within a few decades plus or minus around 1800. I try to emphasize to students that I’m not hung up on dates but rather getting them to see the big picture and the order in which changes occur.”10 By moving the start of the class back a century or so, I turn the onset of formal colonialism into an event within my chronology, rather than the

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threshold for the course. In this way, I can emphasize continuities—both in terms of African societies and African engagement with Europeans—as well as the obvious transformations wrought by colonial rule. I do something similar with political decolonization in the mid-­twentieth century. I try to emphasize both the way that decolonization marked the culmination of hard-­fought campaigns for real change, and how European-­style political structures, colonial institutions, and cultures of “modernity” survived the demise of formal colonies. I like to assign Jonathan Reynolds’s brief book Sovereignty and Struggle for this unit.11 In five chapters, Reynolds focuses first on politics and economics and then on culture, posing the question of how to understand the period that is often described as “postcolonial.” This period is, for me, both the easiest and the most difficult part of the class to teach. Easy, because in some ways the material is familiar and relatable to students. Difficult, because it is possible to fall into being purely presentist and trying constantly to connect patterns in the recent past to the issues of the day—whether to Joseph Kony in the fall of 2012 or Boko Haram in the spring of 2015. Students often get excited about these stories, which seem so relevant. But in the end, there is always the question of whether putting the past in the service of the present achieves the goals we have set for our African history courses. So there you have it. I start my modern Africa class in the eighteenth century and break at two points: the onset of colonialism, and decolonization. Yet in each case I stress not only the changes between these periods but also the continuities, the things that did not change, especially in terms of everyday Africans’ experiences. Two of the richest debates I have all semester occur when I ask students to consider whether these should actually be considered turning points in African history or not. I often then try to turn these into exam or assignment questions. One of my favorite exercises, for example, is to ask students whether decolonization really ended colonialism. Setting students up for success in answering this question requires that I first present colonialism as more than just a question of sovereignty. Rather, I also explore cultural, political, social, and economic aspects and then present evidence about postcolonial legacies

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in all of these areas. The payoff occurs when students successfully engage with the question and come up with their own evaluations of the nature of decolonization.

Conclusion As you have seen, it is possible to use the issue of periodization itself as an intervention in students’ education. At the same time, it may not really be realistic to expect to spend a great deal of time debating issues of periodization or to adopt historical African concepts of time for the course as a whole. In a classroom setting, focusing on African ways of thinking about time may be more useful in addressing specific stories than at the level of the course as a whole. Similarly, the scheme you select for periodizing your class will likely be based on practical issues alongside ethical and intellectual considerations. Nevertheless, students can benefit from even brief introductions to the difficulties and limitations of any periodization and the implications of these challenges for broader issues in historical interpretation outside of the African continent. Often, these lessons can be embedded within the task of assessing continuity and change over time. Helping students to understand the importance of transformative events as well as the long-­term trends that cross them is fundamental to their mastery of historical analysis and can also promote meta-­cognitive learning. These goals may be represented by outcomes such as the following:

4 Students should be able to evaluate which elements of African societies changed, and which did not, with the onset of colonialism and through the processes of political decolonization. Were these events just surface changes, or truly transformative?

Similarly, you can help your students to acquire the skills to build narratives that stretch across longer periods of time and that effectively represent change and continuity. For example, here is a specific outcome from a colleague’s syllabus:

4 Students will construct a chronology for the spread of Islam in 77

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Africa and the Africanization of Islam, not only across regions, but also within and among populations and communities.

Identifying learning outcomes like these can help you to structure your course to relate issues of time to the actual experiences and perspectives of Africans, and to help students to acquire not only knowledge but also a great awareness of the issues of historical analysis.

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Who Are Africans? Designing with Identit y

When I was a grad student, “identity” seemed to be the watchword of both the humanities and the social sciences. As Stuart Hall recognized in his now-­famous article “Who Needs ‘Identity’?,” in the forty years or so between 1960 and 2000 there was “a veritable discursive explosion . . . around the concept of ‘identity,’ at the same moment as it [was] subjected to a searching critique.”1 Young historians like me were told to study the identities of our subjects, but at the same time we were instructed that the categories by which we could most easily study identity—primarily race, class, and gender—were constructed, fluid, and contested rather than concrete and material. It was, for me, a very confusing time. Identity is still with us, and although the term has perhaps lost the power it once had to focus our field, it is still a useful frame through which to talk about the ways that people practice and display their senses of self and their connections to each other. My objective in this chapter is to investigate some of the ways that Africans’ identities enter and inhabit the class-

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room and, in the process, to suggest strategies that may help students take away critical lessons about humans that have value beyond the course. I’ll begin by discussing a few features of identity that I and some colleagues frequently introduce to our students, and then to explore in turn a number of categories through which we organize classroom engagement with issues of identity in African history. Of course, these categories are largely socially constructed, fungible, fuzzy, and overlapping. They are also contingent and mobilized at different times by individuals and groups. In fact, teaching using categories turns out to be quite a messy approach to the issues of identity in African history. But then, the history of humans is a pretty messy subject, students need some way to approach these important questions, and I haven’t seen a better model for the classroom yet.

Introducing Students to Identity Okay, admittedly, you may not find it useful to deliver explicit lessons on the theory surrounding identity to the students in your African history survey courses. They may, nevertheless, profit from a discussion of the opportunities and limitations of employing identity as a guiding concept from an African history perspective. In my classes, I begin to introduce students to identity by distinguishing several ways that scholars talk about this concept: I tell them that identity may, for example, refer to an individual’s or group’s sense of their location within a society, their identification with an internally or externally defined collective or group, their consciousness of their selfhood, or their participation in social and political action.2 I follow this up with four principles that I try to reinforce throughout the class. The first is that identity is constructed and produced through negotiated processes, but that does not mean it is “not real” or is meaningless. People in all places and times communicate and practice identity in order to establish their place in a web of relationships and categories, and their sense of identity plays a role in how they act. In other words, identity is constructed, yes, but not out of nowhere. One resource that is useful in this lesson is Jan Vansina’s explanation of “collective imaginations” in the final pages of How Societies Are Born, a relatively jargon-­free but theory-­driven explanation of how individuals and societies built shared identities in a particular 80

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place and time.3 Specific to West Central Africa, it is nevertheless quite broadly applicable. The second lesson I try to share with students is that identity is compound and malleable. Students often want to reduce identities to singular facets, especially in the case of ethnicity. In my modern African class, I try to counteract this reflex by asking students to explore a quote from Chinua Achebe: I’m an Ibo writer, because this is my basic culture; Nigerian, African and a writer . . . no, black first, then a writer. Each of these identities does call for a certain kind of commitment on my part. I must see what it is to be black—and this means being sufficiently intelligent to know how the world is moving and how the black people fare in the world. This is what it means to be black. Or an African—the same: what does Africa mean to the world? When you see an African what does it mean to a white man?4

Originally, I saved this quote for a discussion associated with decolonization, but I now put it up front so that students have a frame for thinking about identity throughout the course. A third important lesson that I like to share with students at the beginning of the class is that the analytical categories of identity that we use— whether ethnicity, class, gender, or whatever—do not precisely map to the categories of practice that the subjects of our studies would understand. In fact, if we wanted to only use categories that were held by the Africans we study, we would not even be able to talk about “Africa” for most of its past, because it did not exist in anyone’s conceptual identity map! Rather, our analytical categories are at best attempts at approximating the identities people may hold, and sometimes they do not even reach this basic level. A final important lesson about identity that is especially germane to African history classes is that the categories and theoretical frames of identity applied to Africans (and to other humans) have historically been produced within a Western frame of knowledge in which Africans have been classified as “the other,” as V. Y. Mudimbe so effectively taught us in the 1980s.5 Students, I believe, deserve to know not only that the frames in which we have historically understood African identities have in many cases 81

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been imposed by outsiders, but also that Africans identify in ways that cannot be fully or sometimes usefully explained by our categories. None of this means that we should abandon our attempts to understand Africans’ constructions and figurations of identities. Rather, I propose, while using intellectual frameworks of identity in our classes, we should invite students into their constructive critique. By so doing, we can help students to bring the categories we use into critical inquiry for their own purposes, both within the class and beyond. We can also help our students to develop standards and focus for evaluating the categories and frames we use to describe individuals and communities. One standard I particularly like is the question of whether the subjects of our studies would recognize themselves in the accounts we are teaching or writing. By constantly referring to this question, I tell my students, we are driven to create histories that are authentic to the people and societies we are studying.

Africans and the Silence of “Race” One of the categories of identity with which students are already familiar is race. Race has a decidedly odd position in the narratives that historians and other scholars of Africa have spun about the continent’s past. It features centrally in our accounts of apartheid South Africa, fits neatly into our descriptions of colonialism, weaves in and out of our explanations of the Atlantic slave trade, and plays a supporting-­actor role when we focus on Pan-­ Africanism. Before, after, and around these topics, however, race frequently disappears from historians’ work. As Jemima Pierre notes in her groundbreaking book about race in postcolonial Ghana, “Africa could not represent a more racialized location—and yet the continent and its peoples are left out of our current discussions and theorizations of race. In other words, while Africa—as trope and geopolitical space—is clearly understood as the site of racial otherness, it is this very assumption (and all that it entails) that obstructs sustained analyses of race and its continuous and active processes on the continent. Africa stands in for race and yet, paradoxically, race does not exist in Africa.”6 Similarly, race seems absent from discussions of the history of Africa before the modern encounter with Europeans.

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Yet there are all kinds of reasons why we should talk about race in African history. One of these is certainly that constructions of race did function in African contexts outside of the episodes listed above, and any attempt to approximate or represent African identity cannot ignore race. Another is that looking at race in an African setting can help students to think critically about race in an American setting. A final reason is that the history of our field exists alongside the history of racial attitudes toward Africans, and connecting the two is an important step for our classes. Carina Ray, a historian of race in African history, has helped us to do this in a series of articles for the journal New African. In 2008, she wrote an article entitled “We Have a History” that briefly chronicled European racism toward Africans and then followed it with one called “Lest We Forget: Racial Politics of Writing African History.”7 These brief articles, easily accessed online and written for popular audiences, are good entry points into a discussion of race, Africa’s past, and the field of African history. Ray’s articles for the New African make it clear that we cannot ignore race in African history, but also that the topics of European racism and the racism inherent in the history of our discipline are mere starting points for a full exploration of this theme. Recent scholarship has identified a number of other important places to look at race, including the following:

4 Identity formation in Islamic Africa—Choiki el Hamel and Jonathan Glassman look at the ways that race played a role in the formation and contestation of North and East African identities from eighteenth-­century Morocco to postcolonial Zanzibar.8 4 Interracial marriage—In her recent book Crossing the Color Line, Carina Ray looks at both European and African attitudes toward interracial relationships in the Gold Coast from the late nineteenth century to the era of Ghanaian independence.9 4 Métissage and mixed-­heritage identities—Hilary Jones’s work on mixed-­race populations in Senegal spans the nineteenth century and reveals the global and local interrelationships in changing ideas of race and class in West Africa.10

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4 Intellectual conceptualizations of race like negritude—Reiland

Rabaka looks at the work of poets and intellectuals like Leopold Senghor and Aimé Césaire in his classic book on the movement.11

Admittedly, few teaching tools have been designed for these topics, as they have frequently been left out of African history pedagogy. Nevertheless, each of these scholarly works (and there are others) can be profitably turned into a lesson to help students think about constructions of race in particular contexts. Teaching about race in African history purely through the lens of apartheid and formal colonial policies, as I must admit I did for so long, flattens it into a very thin narrative that tells us little about the actual everyday experiences of Africans. By contrast, looking at race as a complex issue pervading many elements of African history, especially in the recent past, opens pathways to student thinking about race outside of the assumptions of the American narrative.

Ethnicity In contrast to race, which is often silenced, one of the most common ways that we speak about Africans is through the filter of ethnicity. Ethnicity is a categorization scheme that is used to group people under corporate categories, usually associated with descent. Ethnicity is often presented as the primary African mode of identification in popular (and some scholarly) literature about Africa. In the kinds of media that most of our students consume, an African is much more likely to be described as “Zulu” or “a Hutu” than “Congolese,” “a mechanic,” or “middle class.” In many narratives of Africa, ethnicity is used interchangeably with tribe, almost without any complications. This is the most common deployment of the category, describing a group of people connected by a rich culture, long history, and blood relationships. This sort of ethnicity is assumed to be tied to kinship. One (non-­Africanist) colleague of mine once quite innocently asserted that kinship was the backbone of all African history, or at least that is how he taught the continent in his world history course. This type of reduction is not uncommon. Moreover, depicting kinship-­based ethnicity as the root cause of all contemporary (and historical) processes 84

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and events in Africa provides simple, easy-­to-describe explanations for crises like the Rwandan genocide of 1994. Unfortunately, such explanations are usually incorrect. As we know, neither ethnicity nor kinship is as simple or as totalizing in African history as it is often depicted. Nor does ethnicity in Africa map well to ethnicity in the United States. Yet despite this, students frequently equate African “tribal” ethnicities with American hyphenated racial groups, at least in terms of relationships to the state. They also frequently look for some singular cultural sign of ethnicity in Africa, especially language, which is often mistaken for group identification. Students also sometimes come to class with preconceptions about specific African ethnicities. Most often, they have heard of the noble Maasai, Zulu, and Asante. Unaware that they are reproducing colonial tropes, they focus on the romanticism of the “unpolluted” noble savages, the great warriors, and know little about Igbo, Xhosa, or Kikuyu, and even less about cosmopolitan, urban African communities. It is almost impossible to avoid complicating such views of ethnicity in our African history classes, even if that were not a goal of the course. Students quickly learn that ethnicity is sometimes at least partly imposed from outside when they learn about “marketing” tactics of Atlantic slave traders and the administrative strategies of colonial officers. Any reasonable history of colonial and apartheid South Africa lets them in on such secrets of the very recent making of Zulu identity through conquest, assimilation, colonial administration, and the claims made by people who have seen advantages in being known as Zulu. The histories we share with students also make it clear that we cannot pretend that ethnicity does not exist in Africa. Frequently recast and reconstructed, sometimes partly imposed from outside, perhaps, ethnicity nevertheless plays a role in the historical and contemporary experiences of most Africans. The distant African past also provides many opportunities to educate students about the uses and limitations of ethnic labels. Students expect histories of early African societies to revolve around ethnic identity. They anticipate encountering fully formed ethnic groups, often with familiar names, moving around and interacting with each other thousands of years ago. Indeed, it is quite dislocating to them when we start using unfamiliar 85

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groupings like “Mashariki Bantu” or broader linguistic titles like “Western Lakes” or “Proto North Nyanza.” When they do encounter these names, they still often conceptualize them as tribes or ethnic groups. We frequently find it necessary to continually reinforce the idea that these labels are categories of analysis, that language is not the same as ethnicity, that the groups we are studying do not necessarily equate to a community of genetically related individuals, and that identity is fluid and negotiated. Ethnicity is also present in histories of the recent African past. How, for example, can we explain such events as the Biafran War without at least some reference to ethnicity? One useful exercise may be to ask students to look at competing explanations that place ethnicity under the microscope and help them to develop complex understandings of important events. For example, students can read brief articles that look at the Rwandan genocide of 1994 as a result of ethnic factionalism, land pressure, or a national culture of obedience.12 In the process, they may learn how ethnicity was a focus for conflict, but not necessarily the underlying cause. This kind of approach does not seek to exclude ethnicity, necessarily, so much as to contextualize and transcend it as the explanation for contemporary Africa.

Gender I am ashamed to admit that I was once among the cadre of historians who told students that I “don’t do gender.” Of course, when I first began to teach, many historians still saw gender as additive, something to be placed on top of or aside from the topics we taught. We could not have been more wrong. Gender was rapidly becoming recognized as a category that permeates all human societies and that informs studies of any topic. I will not go into the historiographic background of this shift, as excellent essays exist for those who want to explore the trajectory of gender and sexuality in African history. Some that I can recommend include Iris Berger’s look back at African women’s history and Nancy Rose Hunt’s inquiry into gender in our field, as well as Nakanyike Musisi’s very recent article on teaching and researching sexuality, referred to below.13 Instead, I will focus on ways to bring gender into the African history classroom as not a stand-alone topic, but instead as a theme infusing the whole course. 86

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The integral nature of gender for culture and social organization is reason enough for us to focus our efforts on gendering our classes, but there are additional reasons to do so as well. First, gender is particularly relevant to many of our students, as they are themselves living in a society where gender roles, norms, and understandings are contested and in flux. In my experience, gender and sexuality are particularly popular topics among students, who see these themes as both important and relevant. Nakanyike Musisi, who teaches in Canada, agrees, writing that while the students she taught in the 1990s had little exposure to gender and sexuality as themes in African history, more recently “a sizeable number of my students had already been introduced to key theories in gender, women, masculinity, and African studies.”14 Gender is also a particularly useful tool by which to help students bring their assumptions into question, sometimes in ways that even the savviest students are not expecting. For example, while many students are eager to accept the idea that Africans’ historical constructions of gender bring those of our own conservative history into question, they are often surprised at critiques aimed by Africans at our Western, progressive notions of feminism and homosexuality. These reappraisals sometimes force them to provincialize movements that they formerly saw as universal. Students can be introduced to both gender theory and African societies’ diverse constructions of gender through relatively brief but dense readings and case studies. Like many of our colleagues, I turn to the pioneering work of the West African scholars Ifi Amadiume and Oyeronke Oyewumi (specifically the introductions to their books) in many of my classes. Between them, the two scholars demonstrated over the course of a decade (1987–­1997) that different societies have held distinct assumptions and ideas about gender. In her early work, Amadiume argued that women in the Igbo-­speaking community she studied were in some circumstances accorded forms of male status. Oyewumi, meanwhile, contended that there was no single category of “woman” in Yoruba society, but rather separate categories such as wife, mother, sacred interpreter, and elder, all of which were normally occupied by females.15 Both texts are easy to excerpt and rich with material to provoke discussion in class. 87

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Doing It: Gendering an African History Unit In trying to teach a gendered course on African history, I have found that a superior method for helping students to understand the significance of gender is to present them with gender scholarship in action. In other words, show them two interpretations of an important event in African history, one before and the other after the introduction of a gendered analysis. In one of my classes, I do this by adapting a set of lessons I learned through the mentorship of Leslie Witz and Premesh Lalu at the University of the Western Cape (uwc), where the history department put together a deeply thought-­ out investigation of gender for their first-­year African history students. The lesson as taught at uwc askes students to consider and evaluate a variety of explanations for the Xhosa cattle-­killing episode of the 1850s. In my variation of the lesson, I prepare students by having them read a narrative of the events leading up to the cattle killing from the Xhosa historian William Gqoba’s collection of oral traditions. I then introduce them to the major work it informed, Jeff Pieres’s The Dead Will Arise.16 My students learn about the factors that, in Pieres’s telling of the story, contributed to the millenarian movement: the slow annexation of land by British settlers, diseases that wiped out animal stocks, the despotism of colonial officials, and the role of key Xhosa actors like the millenarian preacher Wilhelm Goliath (Mhlakaza) and the depressed king Sarhili who clung to his prophecies. Another way to bring these same elements to light, by the way, is by having students read Zakes Mda’s beautiful novel Heart of Redness, which is heavily influenced by Pieres’s work.17 Once students think they have a handle on what happened and why, I introduce them to Helen Bradford’s artful gendering of this same history, which refocuses the story on women and gender transformations.18 Bradford reads the prophetess Nongqawuse as the key agent in the story rather than as a mere tool for important men like Mhlakaza. She looks at the social implications of the loss of land and cattle for Xhosa society, including the breakdown of the marital system and the system for punishing sexual transgressions. She posits that Nongqawuse’s demands that the men kill their cattle were a response to the resulting sexual pressure and insecu88

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rity put on women in this period. Moreover, she bases her interpretation on a rereading of a specific line of Gqoba’s oral history, allowing students to get back to the sources. The result is a total rewriting of the story, and not every student accepts the reinterpretation. That is not the point. By seeing the way that Bradford’s work affects our interpretation of an ecological, religious, and political event, most students come to some level of understanding of the importance of gender as a filter for creating histories that are accurate and authentic no matter what the topic. From here, I take one of two steps toward assessing whether students have taken this lesson onboard. The first is to use an exam question to ask students to explain Bradford’s argument, why it is significant, and what it suggests about the value of gendering a work like this. The second and more extensive approach, which I have designed for my “Gender in African History” class, is to ask students to find a topic in African history that has a significant literature that does not feature a gendered interpretation and to design a research project that could gender this topic. Students then submit a “mock” research proposal for such a project. Three other brief, gendered textbook treatments that bracket the African past deserve your consideration. The first is an impressive tool for looking at the last thirty years. Alicia Decker and Andrea Arrington’s Africanizing Democracies introduces students to the solutions being crafted by Africans to political, economic, health, security, and other problems. Their approach is to focus on these strategies through a gendered framework around the concept of democratizing.19 Gendering the first “half ” of the African history survey is more difficult, because it generally requires the introduction of additional types of sources and techniques that are new to students. But a brief, exciting volume entitled Bantu Africa from Christine Saidi, Rhonda Gonzales, and Cymone Fourshey promises to deliver just this approach.20 They created a rewritten history of Bantu-­speaking communities in Africa over the past several thousand years based on a gendered reading of linguistic, archaeological, and oral tradition evidence. The book argues for the centrality of matrilineality to these societies that challenges students to see gender as central to social, political, and economic functioning. Both of these books are brief enough to be supplementary texts that 89

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could be layered on top of a more traditional textbook to create a dialogue for your students. Another, more extensive treatment is Kathleen Sheldon’s new textbook African Women: Early History to the 21st Century. Focused on women’s history, this textbook nevertheless takes an expansive view of gender and could easily form the framework for a gendered African history survey course, perhaps augmented by readings and activities focused on masculinity, queer history, and a few allied topics.21

Conclusion In introducing this material, I am not trying to insist that every instructor needs to spend lots of time talking about identity as a theoretical concept. Rather, I want to propose that we provide students with frameworks for thinking about Africans as people, and then guide them through the complications they present. These frames can help students to understand how the people we study individually and collectively understood and performed their places in the world, building students’ historical empathy and also increasing the authenticity and accuracy of the lessons we teach. A few learning outcomes may help represent the importance of this understanding for your class. They may look something like this:

4 Students should be able to discuss the role of ethnicity in Africa in the immediate precolonial, colonial, and contemporary era.

Some of your learning outcomes may also be project-­oriented. For example:

4 Students will critique a scholarly article about an important event in African history from a gendered position, determining how a gendered lens might lead to new questions and interpretations about that event.

Whatever goals you identify, you will be doing your students a great service if you can help them to try to see the world from a perspective other than their own and in the process to understand Africans as actors, and not just subjects, of history. Identity, properly employed, is one useful tool for doing so.

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Making Hard Choices Cover age and Uncover age

Hopefully, the last three chapters have helped you make some decisions about how you will structure your course in terms of space, time, and identity. We normally talk about these “who, what, and when” considerations through the paradigm of “coverage.” Taken together, considerations of coverage bedevil the African history course. The problem we face, simply put, is the difficulty of encompassing the entirety of the African continent and its people over a long period of time— hundreds or thousands of years—within a single course (or even a sequence of courses). As teachers, we generally respond to this challenge by employing several strategies. One is to identify broad themes that can tie together the experiences of different regions and populations and describe continuities and changes over extended lengths of time. Alternately, individual instructors often focus a little more on regions that we know well or for which there are good teaching resources available. Inevitably, however, we are forced to skip entire narratives, ignore some societies and communities, and jump over

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long periods of time. But we nevertheless usually strive to achieve a loose sense of ongoing coverage of the history of the continent over a definable, continuous period. But what if this concern with comprehensiveness is misguided? What if we did not even attempt to achieve coverage? What if we instead built our courses around particular skills and enduring understandings that unlock students’ long-­term potential and lifelong competencies? What if we focused on guiding them to discover questions that will stoke their curiosity for further investigation and the tools to research them? This is the strategy called “uncoverage,” described by Grant J. Wiggins and Jay McTighe in their book Understanding by Design.1 Wiggins and McTighe argue that our overriding concern for coverage forces instructors to hide the mechanics, skills, and enduring questions of our discipline in a race to squeeze in all of the content we are supposed to cover. Instead of defining our courses around content areas, they suggest, we should help students to discover the depth of the field. For historians, this means facilitating student discovery of the methods for unearthing the subtle evidence of a complicated past, analyzing it for meaning, making arguments about it, and extending these skills and knowledge into other fields and daily activities. Pursuing uncoverage could entail having students replicate historians’ work processes through in-depth, multiweek units focused on specific original sources and tight research questions embedded in particular places and times, rather than broad surveys of wide spaces and periods. There are, of course, some legitimate reasons to be apprehensive about the adoption of Wiggins and McTighe’s approach in the African history survey course. One, discussed already in chapter 2, is the objection that students need to possess broad knowledge of the (African) past before they can begin to analyze it. Another is that the adoption of an uncoverage approach will mean that significant regions, themes, and people must be left out of your course or at best receive only sketchy coverage. It is hard to dismiss these concerns, just as it is hard to find fault with the objectives of uncoverage. Of course, it isn’t necessary to entirely embrace either a coverage or an uncoverage approach. In this chapter, I propose three different models that 92

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fit somewhere on a continuum between these two poles. First, I propose an approach that attempts continental coverage but punctuated by deep case studies that allow students to understand and contextualize broader themes by focusing on particular examples. In the next two sections, I use the example of the first half of the African history survey to propose structures that go beyond deep case studies to actual uncoverage-­style units. One proposal takes a balanced approach. The other design goes all in for uncoverage.

Doing It: Deep Case Studies In 1997, Donald R. Wright brought out a smart little book entitled The World and a Very Small Place in Africa.2 In its pages, he converged written and oral testimony to demonstrate how the forces of globalization and the motion of global events profoundly affected the lives of people in a place normally considered to be an “out-­of-the-­way” region of Africa. For our purposes, Wright’s volume brings into focus the difficulty of introducing students to both the history of the African continent and the many human stories that make it up. Focusing effectively on any single community’s story takes a massive amount of contextualization and background, an impossible task to carry out repeatedly in a survey course. Yet at the same time, just surveying the continent, or even any large region of the continent, does not really allow us to bring deep issues or long histories into critical focus. So what is an instructor to do? One approach that many of our colleagues seem to select is to provide broad outlines of major trends in African history, but to illustrate these points in depth by looking more closely at one or two regions of Africa. These oscillations from breadth into depth and back again allow them to give students pieces of evidence and to devote time to helping them to analyze and question the evidence. Each case demonstrates some major African and global trend of the period while also exposing students to a local and unique story. There is a cost to this approach, of course, and I’ve experienced it in my own classes: While I strive to contextualize each of my case studies within continent-­wide frames, I still fail to achieve full geographic coverage at any depth for each period I cover in my survey course. But the gamble I make is that the case studies will impart skills and competencies 93

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that students can export to questions and places in which they are interested, on their own. Sometimes I even use several brief case studies to demonstrate variations within a single broad theme. I do this when I cover the Industrial Revolution in African history. This has, in recent years, become the first deep unit in my Modern African History course. I begin this unit with a lecture and readings (usually assigned from the textbook) on Africans’ contributions to the Industrial Revolution and its impact on the continent. This includes commodity replacement, deindustrialization, and social change. But then I move into a series of case studies, each of which begins with an introduction of a society and then focuses on its nineteenth-­century experience. One case study focuses on Egypt and Muhammad Ali’s policies and experiments with industrialization. Another looks at the transition from slaves to oilseeds in West Africa. I spend time on palm oil in the Gold Coast, because that is an area I know well, but one could also look at the Niger River area or at groundnuts in the Senegal River Valley. Finally, I spend a few days on mining and “settler capitalism” in southern Africa. In each case, I stress Africans’ attempts to master or control the production and sale of goods desired by an industrializing Europe, and the response by European companies, settlers, and governments, whether in terms of tariffs and taxes or conquest. Students get a good sense of both the different experiences of these regions, as well as the broader themes that connected the Industrial Revolution to colonialism and the partition of the continent. This kind of deep case study approach is not quite uncoverage, because it focuses around content-­based themes rather than building analytical and research skills. As such, it probably works best with a textbook that is similarly thematically structured. Vincent Khapoya’s The African Experience is one example.3 Moving through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Khapoya identifies large political changes in the movement from “traditional institutions” through “political development in historic Africa” to “African nationalism” and “African independence” and finally into “Africa in world affairs.” This political approach frames a reasonably comprehensive (if necessarily cursory) survey of the African past, but it still leaves time around which you can build deep analyses of evidence or case studies. 94

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Doing It: A Balanced Approach to the First Half of the African History Survey The first semester or quarter of the African history survey is particularly well suited to an approach that combines uncoverage-­style units with broad thematic surveys. Because it is impossible to provide full coverage in a course spanning such a long period of time, instructors usually choose instead to select several important broad themes. But the richness and diversity of the methodologies used to study these earlier periods also lend themselves to units that demonstrate these themes through a combination of original sources, lessons about methods, and precise areas of content. In my own courses on the early history of Africa, my starting point for this balanced coverage and uncoverage approach is a textbook that provides both the entry points for deep, complex units and a continentwide survey to help with understanding them. This is Chris Ehret’s archaeology-­ influenced and linguistic-­inflected textbook, The Civilizations of Africa: A History to 1800, which begins the human story in Africa about 60,000 years ago.4 Ehret’s book is peopled by communities that spread across the different regions of Africa, then made distinctive moves toward domesticating plants and animals or alternately became foraging experts, and who form the core of the language/culture groups that dominate his narrative: Congo, Nilo-­Saharan, Khoisan, and Afrasan (an Afro-­Asiatic language group). Early chapters tell the story of how these societies came to populate the continent, built cultures around the new technology of agriculture and pastoralism, experienced dramatic environmental change, and adopted iron-­working technology and large-­scale commerce. Intercontinental relationships—whether with Europeans, the Ottoman Empire, or Arab and Indian traders—figure prominently in chapters but always take a backseat to the doings of people who are shaping their environments, creating technologies, forming states, and changing their cultures. The second edition of the book includes important tools for courses like ours: unpacking key terms like “race” and “civilization,” introducing important themes that run through the book, and providing critical reflections and questions in a “notes for readers” section. Elizabeth Isichei’s A History of African Socie95

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ties to 1870 looks to be a good alternative, although I have not taught from it myself.5 Ehret’s explicit use of multiple types of sources within his textbook provides a very practical set of opportunities around which to build uncoverage units that develop student skills working with different types of evidence: physical anthropology, early written sources, archaeological sources, oral tradition, and linguistics. Such units could be connected to his chapters— especially the specific debates he raises in his “notes for readers” sections. You can construct your lectures and activities for these units using any of three methodological guide texts: Sources and Methods in African History, Writing African History, and African Histories: New Sources and New Techniques for Studying African Pasts.6 I discuss these volumes at length in chapter 8. Each walks you through the evidence connecting specific issues and events with the evidence behind them. Table 6.1 is one model of an uncoverage unit that could easily be built out of these volumes and tied to chapters in The Civilizations of Africa. Table 6.1. Topic and Methodology Pairings

Source/ Method

Theme

Ehret Chapter

Case Study

Physical anthropology

Human evolution

1: Introducing Africa and Its History

East Africa, c. 60,000 bce

Linguistics

Migration/ diffusion

4: Diverging Paths of History

Central Africa, c. 3000 bce–­1000 ce

Written sources

Building and maintaining the state

5: An Age of Commerce, an Age of Iron

North Africa, c. 3000 bce–­1000 ce

Archaeology

Cities and settlement patterns

7: Northeastern, West, and North Africa

West Africa, c. 400–­1400 ce

Oral tradition

Atlantic slave trade

9: Africa in the Era of the Atlantic Slave Trade

West Central Africa, c. 1500–­1800

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This particular arrangement allows you to build uncoverage-­style units that punctuate broader trends in African history across the continent. It is just one set of suggestions, but it happens to be easiest to design because each unit is supported by brief, useful chapters within these three guide texts. The pairings may raise controversial methodological and philosophical questions—for example, the use of oral sources to understand African perspectives on the Atlantic slaving system, while rich and satisfying for students, also reveals major methodological issues—but these types of debates about ethics, accuracy, and our responsibility to our subjects are exactly the sort of learning opportunity that uncoverage offers. You can design your own assessment tools for units like this, or you can use the worksheets in African Histories: New Sources and New Techniques for Studying African Pasts. These worksheets are designed to be completed at home, but then to be available for group work in class. I require students to bring in a typed draft of their answers, but I then allow them to pencil in revisions to their answers during class for partial credit. I find that this strategy links the textbook, worksheets, and a classroom activity in a reinforcing learning progression.

Doing It: Going All-­Out for Uncoverage in the First Half of the African History Survey While I personally prefer a model for teaching early African history that situates uncoverage-­style units within a broad, thematic survey, one could also argue for entirely abandoning any attempt at coverage at all. As Constanze Weise argues, the greatest value of studying this early period may be its potential to alter any “perception students have about the continent, its people, and its history.”7 Her argument, essentially, is that an early African history course confronts students with a double alterity in being both non-­ Western and premodern, and that this alienation is important for students who too easily conceived of the past not in terms that are most familiar to them. Such an outcome is not well served by a coverage approach that strictly attempts to touch on all of the major stories of the era, but rather by profound encounters with people and societies. 97

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So imagine you are going to abandon the idea of coverage entirely, and perhaps even move away from trying to identify a few key content themes in your course. Instead, you could offer students a series of profound encounters with societies and people and with the process of interpreting the evidence of their lives and worldviews. An obvious place to start would be to look for primary sources around which to build these encounters. These may take many forms—documents, artifacts, images, words, and sounds. Some possibilities are discussed in chapter 8. Another place to start, however, is with written documentary collections, including Robert O. Collins’s three-­volume African History in Documents and the more recent Documents from the African Past.8 J. F. P. Hopkins and Nehemia Levtzion’s collection of Arabic-­language sources is also quite rich.9 If you are interested in archaeological and ethno-­archaeological sources, the works of Susan Keech McIntosh and Roderick J. McIntosh in the Inland Niger River Delta are well documented, and I have had great success bringing students to debate their findings, methods, and the broader implications of the heterarchical political system and “Mande Core Rules” they describe.10 Identifying the primary sources is just a first step in building uncoverage units. You will also want to provide students with historical context for understanding the sources. Even more important, they will need a range of activities and assignments that will help them to pull meaning out of the documents as historians do, including a sense of the methods they are expected to employ. Finally, uncoverage-­style units demand the kinds of framing questions meant to help students think philosophically and intentionally about the method they are using and the findings they are reaching. Sometimes you can get a head start on building an uncoverage-­style experience by building from scholarly studies that feature sources centrally and that explicitly ask the kinds of questions you want students to encounter. John Thornton’s approach to Central West Africans’ accounts of the slave trade is an example. Thornton reconstructed aspects of seventeenth-­ century and eighteenth-­century Kongolese worldviews to try to understand the idiom of cannibalism through which many KiKongo speakers and their neighbors spoke about enslavement.11 He suggests that cannibalism was 98

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understood as being related to witchcraft, and that witchcraft was a symptom of greed, and that therefore the main frame through which KiKongo speakers understood the trade was an autochthonous paradigm of greed and its impact on the stability, balance, and values of their society. Kwasi Konadu pursues a similar approach, but over a somewhat broader area, in his innovative Transatlantic Africa: 1440–­1888. In this book, Konadu manages to reconstruct Africans’ understandings of slavery, enslavement, commodification, and self in the context of the slave trade and in a way that is accessible to many students.12 Both Konadu and Thornton excerpt and feature the sources they analyze within their text. Their work provides the opportunity to have students work with sources themselves, then see how professional historians have worked with them, and finally reflect on the process of historical interpretation. In a few cases, uncoverage units exist that are pretty much already built for you. One of the potentially most interesting is the Gädlä Wälättä P.et.ros. This biography of a seventeenth-­century Ethiopian female religious leader has been made available to us in English by Wendy Laura Belcher and Michael Kleiner in their excellent book The Life and Struggles of Our Mother Walatta Petros.13 The biography raises themes of religious cosmopolitanism, the construction of gender, and protocolonialism. In the hands of Belcher and Kleiner, it also allows students to examine the production of a particular kind of historical text, the Ethiopian gädl. Helpfully, Belcher has provided us with an excellent example of uncoverage in the accompanying “lesson plan” she designed on the topics of sexuality and religious identity.14 The unit includes a YouTube talk, scholarly articles and debates, and related poems and songs. Sections of the book’s introduction also lend themselves to a few clear frames for developing assignments and classroom activities as well, although these will take a little work by the instructor. There is plenty of rich material there for asking and having students answer questions about not only sexuality and religion in seventeenth-­century Ethiopian society, but also the findings of Belcher, Kleiner, and other scholars. Additionally, the rich corpus of sources Belcher provides is broad enough for students to design and seek to answer their own small research questions by the end of the unit. 99

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Conclusions The discussion in this chapter is not meant to be taken as an imperative to abandon coverage in the African history course. Personally, I still feel that my students can benefit from continentwide thematic surveys, and my “Modern African History” course retains this approach, albeit punctuated by deep case studies. If I abandoned a coverage model in some of my other courses, including the first half of the survey, it was because I believe that in the limited time that I have to cover that enormous period, it is better to deliver profound encounters with a few societies than a shallow survey of many. You will have your own thoughts about how coverage and uncoverage strategies may help you to deliver on your goals for your own courses. Each strategy contains a different set of opportunities to tie your course design to the particular goals you have. In the next few chapters, we will discuss some additional opportunities you may have to build the course that will help you to reach your goals.

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Opportunities

Eventually, of course, the time comes for the Mbudye historian to perform the lukasa before an audience. After all, there is no purpose to conceiving and building a lukasa except that it might be shared with those who need to hear a history and can benefit from its lessons. The same is true of the course you are building, and I hope this final section helps you get closer to a successful performance. Your pathway to the moment you stand before students, however, demands that you think about more than just “who, what, and where.” You can also build opportunities for students to learn valuable skills and internalize lessons that will serve them throughout their studies and lives. This part of the book is about those opportunities and the potential of an African history course to do more than deliver content or even help students to question their preconceptions. One chapter explores

Pa rt I I I

the possibility of engaging questions of ethics through the study of African history. The next is about introducing students to research methodologies and skills from a wide range of disciplines. A third focuses on digital resources and the digital divide not only as teaching tools but also as lessons for thinking about inequality and power in today’s world. In the final chapter, I try to bring these questions together with material from the first two parts of the book in a very practical way. This last chapter covers issues of syllabus design, course format, and assessment. I hope that together, these four chapters will help you to design a course that helps students to achieve the goals you set out for them.

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4^ Chapter Seven 64

Ethical Thinking as an Outcome of the African History Course

In most undergraduate history majors and high school history sequences, the curriculum is organized by content areas—geographic, chronological, and sometimes thematic. Sometimes, a department will offer a course in historical methods, or in some skill set like public history or digital history. It is rare to find a historical ethics course offered by a history department in the United States. Yet at least at the tertiary level, we expect students in the history major to attain some grasp of personal and professional ethical behavior and a philosophy of ethics. After all, such considerations of ethics are intrinsic to the practice of the historian. They help to define and mediate our relationships to the subjects of our study. This is especially true for African history, where power differentials between researchers and subjects are particularly stark. Nevertheless, while most historians seem to believe that development in this area is something that will help our students in both their studies and their lives, we tend not to consciously designate where ethics will live in the undergraduate major.

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In this chapter, I suggest some ways that instructors can enmesh ethics into the matrix of their African history courses. I start from the position that a fully formed African history course should ask students to deliberate on ethical matters, even if they remain in the background of the class structure. Students who come out of an African history course knowing how to ask questions about the ethical considerations involved in historical research, and who understand something about African systems of ethics, will more fully realize their appreciation and comprehension of the African past. Even more important, they will be better prepared to take actions in their lives and studies after the course is completed.

Is It Ethical to Study Africa? Is it ethical to study Africa? This question was posed to the members of the African Studies Association (asa) at our 2006 annual meeting by the psychologist and scholar Amina Mama.1 In both her keynote presentation and the paper based on it, Mama chose not to begin by directly answering the question. Instead, she focused on identifying an ethical tradition within the works of late colonial and postcolonial African intellectuals that she defines as an ethic of freedom. Her paper focused on the way that scholars in this tradition designed their work to contribute to the liberation of the continent and its people from the forces of colonial rule, globalization, and other forms of oppression. Her message to the members of the asa, then, was that those of us “based in the relatively well-­endowed and resourced U.S. academy have an ethical responsibility to support, facilitate, and participate in this engagement, instead of just disseminating their own ideas, as if Africa had no intellectuals, no knowledge to contribute.”2 This responsibility constituted an affirmative, if qualified, answer to the question of whether or not it is ethical to study Africa. Mama’s paper raises one of the core ethical challenges facing our field. In perhaps no other field of history is the difference in funding and resources so large between local and Western-­based scholars. As a result, both the North American and European academies produce more published, peer-­ reviewed scholarship on Africa than do African universities. This imbal-

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ance provokes a number of questions for the student of African history. First, can we identify the ethic that currently inhabits the field of African history? Do African historians strive for truth, for human rights, or for some other goal? Second, where do these ethics come from? Are the ethics of African communities present in the study of African history, and if not, should they be? Should we worry about the authenticity of our ethics, or should we strive for scholarly objectivity and distance? And how is our field’s ethics connected to the operation of power in the production of African history? Finally, in producing history, are we alienating the past from the descendants of those who experienced it or are we making it more available to them? Who owns a story, the historian who writes it down and interprets it, or the interlocutors? There is an implicit critique within these questions that refers to three common exclusions or relegations from the realm of scholarly production: that of the African-­based historian, that of African knowers of the past who are not formally trained historians, and that of the African subjects of our studies. The first relegation is perhaps the most ironic. In the years during which the field of African history was founded, as African states gained their political independence, most of the great historians of the continent were Africans such as Joseph Ki-­Zerbo and A. Adu Boahen. Yet with the growing acceptance of the field, Western-­based historians have come to predominate. As Ibrahim Abdullah notes, “Fifty years later the story is completely different: African historians are marginal to a scientific field of enquiry that supposedly produces knowledge about their societies.”3 The second exclusion is one in which Africans charged with knowing the past—the griot, the okyeame—are treated as sources rather than as historians themselves. They are not our colleagues, but merely our informants. The final exclusion, that of Africans to the place of merely being subjects of study rather than shapers of interpretation, is one that seems to reproduce the practices of the colonial anthropologist in the “field” studying the “native”: a troubling heritage indeed. It is not necessary to fully agree with the critique in the previous paragraph to endorse the idea that students should be asked, in our classes, to

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think about the ethics of doing African history from a position of relative power and about the relevance and recognizability of our work for Africans. Such contemplation is an important strategy for transforming our courses into interventions in their intellectual development and lives. Specifically, it offers students a pathway to critically assess their relationships and roles within the world in which they live. A prime example of this kind of opportunity involves students’ approach to African victimhood. As we briefly saw in chapter 1, many students come to our classes hoping to “help” Africans. In some ways this is commendable, for Africans have certainly been victimized by global processes in the recent past. But taking the position that Africans need our help arguably perpetuates and exacerbates that victimization. As Iweala Uzodinma points out, campaigns to “save” Africa tend to “promote the stereotype of Africa as a black hole of disease and death. News reports constantly focus on the continent’s corrupt leaders, warlords, ‘tribal’ conflicts, child laborers, and women disfigured by abuse and genital mutilation.” The worst of “such articles are reminiscent of reports from the heyday of European colonialism.”4 Even the best operations are resonant of the nineteenth-­ century European abolitionist movement from which they are descendant that position and credit Western society as the saviors of Africa without really empowering Africans.5 How, then, should we teach about the victimization of Africans in the past, and its continued legacy in the present, in ways that empower students to think critically about their ethical responsibilities? Should we ignore victim-­centered narratives and focus instead on African successes, telling alternate stories to those offered by the media? Should we do what Gary Marquardt does: design our courses around thematic “packages” that respond directly to uncritical media coverage of contemporary problems and their historical backgrounds?6 Should we try to understand how Africans themselves are seeking to solve these challenges, or should we study how our own societies contributed and benefited from the problems faced by Africans in the past and into the present? Should we explore Africans’ ethical worlds and position these as alternatives to our own ethical assumptions? 106

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Ethics and Themes in the Study of African History All of these approaches take different starting points and adopt various strategies, but they have one thing in common—they embrace the idea that the study of African history should involve ethical considerations. Rather than promoting one or several of these strategies, I want to use several common African history topics to suggest ways to integrate ethical considerations into your classes. One of the most challenging episodes of African history to teach is that of the Atlantic slave trade and slaving system. It is a topic that is as difficult for African societies today as it is for Americans, and the resulting struggles in both societies constitute part of the challenge of teaching this material.7 At its very heart are questions of who has the authority to talk about the past—continental Africans, diasporic Africans, or Western scholars—and in what epistemological setting. Similarly, it raises the question of what relative values we assign to African memorials, diasporic re-­memory, or Western-­style empirical scholarship. Finally, as Curtis Keim notes, students often want to reduce the issue to how to assign blame, or even wonder how “Africans could do this to their own people.”8 We sometimes react to these questions by assigning primary sources that we hope will lead students to engage the last of these issues. Some instructors assign contrasting historical interpretations like excerpts from John Thornton’s Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World and Anne Bailey’s African Voices of the Atlantic Slave Trade.9 Others focus on teaching the slave trade as experience, using narratives like Olaudah Equiano or the many compiled in African Voices on Slavery and the Slave Trade.10 It is possible to turn primary sources into a window into complex questions. For example, reading personal accounts of the slave trade often brings up emotions for many students. Rather than trying to avoid or embrace these emotions, we can explicitly ask students to think and discuss whether historians should be emotional when studying a tragedy. Similarly, by including memorials and oral tradition in assigned primary sources about the slaving system, we can guide students toward debates about how to value memory and oral traditions in Africa and the diaspora versus contradic107

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tory written and quantitative sources that are typically assigned high historical value.11 If students are reading Thornton and Bailey, we can simply ask them with whom they agree more, or we can also push them to think about where each scholar’s account of African participation in the slave trade comes from and what kinds of “truth” it values. Other opportunities to embed ethics into studies of the African past relate directly to contemporary problems that students know well, such as disease, violence, development, and climate change. Students whose motives are to “help” Africa, in particular, require some ethical complicating of their straightforward narratives. For example, they might ask why Africans seem to suffer so much from disease. Giving historical dimensions within the form of ecological or demographic narratives only partly answers this question. Another part of any answer is to expose them to the relationship between African and Western healing systems, and the inequities produced by colonial medicine and modern bioprospecting.12 Similarly, students interested in hiv/aids can look at how Western medicine and anthropology first constructed the epidemic as a problem of African culture, and even the way that some governments—like that of South Africa—responded by depicting it as a product of Western medical or environmental malpractice.13 Placing these contemporary issues within the historical context of the encounter between African and colonial medicine allows students to extrapolate the ethical issues of contemporary Western intervention into African medical problems and solutions, and to think about what this means for projects aimed at “saving” Africa. Units designed to address contemporary violence in Africa can similarly help students to think about the ethical considerations raised by Western attitudes toward the continent. The background for this kind of unit could be the discursive notion that savagery and barbarism are implicitly African traits. Students may benefit from reading firsthand accounts of European exploration and conquest in Africa, such as Henry Morton Stanley’s journey through the continent, which is shockingly replete with offhand accounts of his expeditions’ rampant murder and theft. Alternately, you may share with them sources from well-­known episodes like the 1904 German Genocide of the Herero or King Leopold’s rule in the 108

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Congo. Ask them then who was the savage, and who the civilizer? How can we know? These readings may be supported by a secondary source reading, like Dennis Laumann’s superb chapter on colonial violence in his excellent brief history of colonial Africa.14 From there, the class can focus, for example, on the Rwandan genocide. Students will mainly know of these events as the culmination of “ethnic tensions” between BaHutu and BaTutsi peoples (as discussed in chapter 2). Such interpretations suffuse both media and “world history” accounts of the events of 1994. But they might not have considered the way in which Western news organizations and governments constructed these accounts as just “Africans being Africans,” while attributing to their own countries the role of mere spectators. Jacques Depelchin explains the problems with these accounts in a chapter entitled “Genocide in Rwanda and the Question of Ethics in African History.” In this chapter, he argues that responsibility for the genocide belongs not only to Rwandans, but also to those in our own societies who created the conditions—historical and contemporary—in which it could occur. These conditions include not only the political legacies of colonialism, but also the marginalization of Africans as humans and as actors and their depiction as outsiders and, at best, victims. Depelchin concludes his argument by imploring us to apply an ethical framework to our study of these events that focuses on how we change our attitudes toward Africans, rather than changing Africans themselves, in order to avoid future genocides.15

Doing It: Foregrounding Ethics In each of the examples here, I suggest that the instructor foreground contemporary issues and their historical contexts, while thoughts and questions about ethics form part of students’ background considerations. However, it is also useful in some cases to put ethics at the forefront of a course (at least for a while). One way to do this is to introduce “African ethics” into the American classroom. Amina Mama’s article “Is It Ethical to Study Africa?” provides one on-­ramp to the study of African ethics. Mama focuses much of the article on the ethical commitment of twentieth-­century African scholars to African liberation, expressed through nationalism and 109

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Pan-­Africanism. Through it, she explores both the contemporary uses and limitations of this ethic through the article, as well as the ethical and institutional challenges facing African scholars. Such an article may be usefully read by students and discussed in class. Another way to introduce African ethics to the classroom is by using the palaver structure in the classroom setting. “Palaver” is a synonym for “discussion” in many languages, but in BaKongo society it represents a knowledge exchange that Ernest Wamba-­dia-­Wamba describes as “a kind of community strike . . . a process of ‘spiritual’ cleaning-up of the community’s ‘house’ . . . a mass bursting of active involvement in matters of the entire community and of free or liberated speaking . . . a social movement . . . [or] an ideological struggle assuming appropriate form to resolve real community’s conflicts giving rise to ideological tension.”16 The palaver is intended to stabilize the community and to reattach it to its historical roots as well as to resolve challenging issues. In its original setting, the palaver is ideally organic rather than centrally organized, but as an instructor you can usefully introduce it into your classroom. You could use palavers in the classroom in varying ways. They could be scheduled into a class session on a topic that is ethically and theoretically fraught, as a way to create an informal setting where students could feel free to try to share their positions and how they are feeling. They could be inserted when issues are encountered in class that unexpectedly demand a free and open exchange. Either way, the bonus is that students will learn about the palaver as a tool of BaKongo and related African societies while resolving their own problems. By reading Wamba’s article, and seeking to approximate or relate to the idealized palaver, students would commit to recognize an African ethic and at the same time seek to learn from it. The palaver is not an activity that I would attach to a high-­stakes assessment tool. Students need to have the opportunity for this kind of exploration in a low-­stakes environment. However, ethics can also form an important consideration in graded class projects. Todd Cleveland does this in his “Africa: Which Way Forward” course, which explores contemporary challenges such as hiv/aids, desertification, and Somali piracy within a synchronic context. His course curriculum features interviews with immigrants 110

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to the United States from Africa. Students prepare for these interviews through a series of steps in which they look at media views of contemporary situations in Africa and are then guided to think critically about them by using scholarly sources. They then bring both of these types of sources to bear in their interviews, which are meant to elicit personal perspectives on the issues they are studying. In Cleveland’s design, however, the objective of bringing these sources together is not merely meant to yield content, but also to lead students to think about ethical issues. Cleveland makes sure that students understand that many of the Africans interviewed “fled situations at home that were, at a minimum, disagreeable, but were just as often violent and potentially lethal, and thus interviewing them requires a conscious consideration of the risks they have already taken as well as the current challenges that they face.”17 Students therefore have to go through an institutional review board process, and interviewees can choose whether or not they will allow the discussion to be recorded or placed in the public domain. In this way, ethical questions become part of the very structure of the project and of students’ learning process.

Conclusion I would venture to guess that you are not a trained ethicist or philosopher. Certainly, I am not, and I am not in the least qualified to teach a course on ethics. But having studied the historical—and seen the contemporary— disparities of power in the relationship between my society and those in Africa, I believe that it is my responsibility to share these observations with students and to empower them to develop at least rudimentary frameworks for judging behavior toward Africans. Similarly, I think it is my duty to feature opportunities to learn from African societies, not least in strategies for decision making and conflict resolution. I have a single learning outcome that often represents my commitment to an ethical approach to African history. It goes somewhat like this:

4 Students will be able to identify issues of social justice and power in the scholarly study of Africa and to construct a plan for contributing purposefully and ethically to this field of study. 111

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This learning outcome works best for classes where I have large numbers of upper-­division history (or anthropology) majors, many of whom have plans to go on in their fields. It is tied to a reflective, low-­stakes assignment that I place at the end of the course. For lower-­division courses, I aim toward asking students to think about how they could contribute purposefully to the well-­being of both their own community and contemporary African societies through the adoption of an ethical framework. This requires them to think about how African ethical systems could help us, as well as how we should ethically interact with Africans.

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Teaching Methodology and Source Interpretation through the African History Course

Several times in earlier chapters, I advocated connecting students with sources produced by Africans as a key strategy for reaching the goals you set for your course, no matter what they may be. Putting students in contact with African voices and images helps to reverse Africans’ objectification. It also allows students to see how Africans have constructed their own worlds. Properly used, this kind of evidence can be a foundation to students’ development of critical and creative skills. Hence working with primary sources is the principal technique available to us to help them to acquire accurate and rich interpretations of the African past and the most direct way to teach them the historians’ craft. As Africanists, we are fortunate to have access to a rich palette of African-­created evidence to share with our students— from oral tradition, linguistic, and archaeological artifacts of the distant past to movies, literature, music, and oral histories from more recent periods, not to mention written sources. But using original sources to teach effectively is not as easy as put-

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ting student and source together and—bam!—all your goals are magically achieved. To achieve the kind of sophisticated, nuanced interpretations of the past that these sources promise, our students need to learn how to read them critically. They need to be taught strategies for converging multiple, diverse scraps of evidence into a collective interpretation. They need to learn how to read a single source deeply and thickly, as well as how to pull meaning from the margins and the main text. How can we transfer all of these competencies to them in the classroom, especially when we have little time in a semester and so much to cover, and when we are ourselves seldom experts of all of the diverse and complicated methodologies at use in African history ourselves? The basic strategy I propose in this chapter is to combine scholarly publications with primary source material into method-­focused lessons and activities. You may choose to begin by focusing on evidence and areas of the past that derive from your own research. However, there are so many wonderful studies of the past, so many incredible sources, and so much rich work on methodology available these days that it should not be too difficult for you to locate several examples through which you might want to take your class deep into the evidence for a week or two. Such units may begin with historical contextualization in the form of a textbook reading and/or lecture, then move into monograph chapters or articles that feature contrasting interpretations of an event or historical situation, and then guide students into the evidence used in those works, perhaps even asking them to work with similar evidence for a different region or time. Or you might reverse the design to begin the evidence and then move through context, methodology, and finally some scholarly work. In this chapter, I hope to present resources to support several different models for this kind of design approach. Most of this chapter is divided into sections that deal with specific types of sources with which you may wish your students to engage. I do not try to cover every kind of source. Instead, I focus on some types of evidence that are either difficult to teach or especially significant for our field. In each case, I try to set out some key points of methodology and important

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methodological guide texts. In many cases, I also identify specific monographs and articles or sources that might be good to share with students. First, however, I want to briefly describe three useful resources that I identified at the end of chapter 6: Each deals with questions of methodology in African history. The first of these is Sources and Methods in African History: Spoken, Written, Unearthed.1 This is a 2003 collection of papers on methodology and sources that was originally presented at a conference presided over by the formidable Toyin Falola. Well edited and multidisciplinary, the collection features outstanding chapters by major scholars, most often explaining how a particular methodology can be used to provide an interpretation for a specific research question bounded in time and space. Published just two years later, Writing African History is an equally useful volume edited by John Edward Philips and published in a series also edited by Falola.2 The chapters in these volumes tend to be aimed at exploring the opportunities and limits of methodologies rather than specific problems. The first half of the book is particularly useful for instructors who wish to teach students methodological approaches that will be new to them, either as a guide text for the instructor or assigned to students. The final volume is African Histories: New Sources and New Techniques for Studying African Pasts.3 Written by Esperanza Brizuela-­Garcia and me, this workbook for students contains chapters that deal with specific methodologies utilizing examples from Africa’s past.

Learning about the Distant Past Using Historical Linguistics Our understanding of the deep African past has advanced rapidly over the past few decades, thanks in large part to advances in the methodology of historical linguistics. When I designed my “Precolonial Africa” course in the 1990s, the contours of the textbooks I consulted were still largely defined by written sources and what we could deduce from oral tradition, with some archaeology in the mix. Unbeknownst to me at the time, however, a great deal of work was happening in the background as serious researchers—mostly students (or the students of students) of Chris Ehret

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or Jan Vansina—began to reconstruct a world of experience and meaning from the bones of historical language, often cross-­analyzed with archaeological evidence. I waited and waited for this material to make its way into African history textbooks, but it has done so only very slowly. This is partly because few African historians really understand historical linguistics, but also because even within the small community that does there remain serious differences about the meaningfulness and veracity of specific research. It is very important that instructors engage historical linguistics if we want to teach an up-­to-date course in early African history. But how are we to do this, when most of us are not linguistic historians? A few guide texts for the interested scholar exist: Chris Ehret’s chapter in Writing African History, for example, or Gerrit Dimmendaal’s dense instructional volume.4 These works can help the instructor develop a lecture around cognate analysis and the words-­and-­things method. Once you teach the basic guidelines of these methods, you can begin to demonstrate them to students using actual words and phrases from historical and contemporary languages. For example, you can use ComparaLex’s Comparative Bantu or Comparative African word lists (http://​www​.comparalex​.org) to present students with lists of words from several related languages and have them search for cognates. You can also demonstrate or have students practice using cognates in languages that may be more familiar, like English, Spanish, and German. It may also be useful to introduce students to a scholarly reading based on this kind of methodology so they can actually see historical linguistics at work. I like Kathryn de Luna’s groundbreaking essay “Affect and Society in Precolonial Africa.”5 Not only is this an excellent demonstration of the way in which a historian can use vocabulary and semiotics to identify change over time and across societies, but it also uses historical linguistic techniques to get specifically at questions of affect, or emotion, which might otherwise be unrecoverable for this era and place. Moreover, the connected cases de Luna studies are taken from Niger-­Congo languages diffuse across the African continent, and they thus provide excellent examples of continuities as well as divergence, and the article has a brief lexicon appended to help the reader. Many of my students love this article, but you could equally use work by David Schoenbrun, Christine Saidi, Neil Kodesh, or other schol116

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ars whose work with languages addresses topics or regions that are within the scope of your course.

Learning through Oral Histories and Oral Traditions A second category of sources that has vastly enriched the scholarship of our field is oral tradition and oral history. As defined by Vansina, oral traditions are records or messages passed down through multiple generations by means of oral transmission, whereas an oral history is a firsthand account, related from memory, of events and situations that occurred during a person’s lifetime. Both types of sources occupy prominent positions in our field, not least because they give us access to Africans’ constructions of their own history outside of written (often colonial) sources. It was for this reason that the African scholars who participated in the decolonizations of both their continent and their nations’ histories in the 1950s and 1960s— such as J. F. Ade Ajayi, Saburi Biobaku, and K. O. Dike—fought to establish the value and veracity of these kinds of sources. Over time, of course, critics emerged. They argued that oral sources are largely performative and overly malleable, and the information they contained cannot be verified. For many detractors, oral sources reflect current conditions in the setting in which they are performed much more closely than the past they claim to describe. Enthusiasts responded that these sources are nevertheless interpretable as metaphors or messages from the past, especially when they can be converged with other kinds of evidence. Joseph C. Miller put together a pretty useful history of this debate in his eminently readable 1999 American Historical Association presidential address, available online and accessible to students.6 One result of this debate is a rich set of texts that can help students to learn about—and use—this kind of evidence. Vansina attempted to establish a set of guidelines for using oral tradition in his enthusiastic Oral Tradition as History.7 By contrast, David Henige—once a student of Vansina—published his concerns about this approach, not least as a chapter in Writing African History.8 Other important contributions to this debate, and to the use of oral history generally, include Joseph Miller’s The African Past Speaks and African Words, African Voices, an important praxis-­oriented vol117

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ume edited by Luise White, Stephan Miescher, and David William Cohen.9 Students can read excerpts of some of these works—preferably a mix of the work of enthusiasts and skeptics—but they are also useful as background reading for instructors. As is usually the case, I find that students do better when they work with more specific material. For example, I adapted a lesson on changing ideas about gender and the household in one part of West Africa from Emily Osborn’s Our New Husbands Are Here. Osborn kindly provides extensive oral traditions in the book, which I share with students, who also read her introduction. Rather than having students read most of the chapters, however, I present some of her historical contextualization and then ask students to ponder the meaning of the oral traditions themselves, before sharing Osborn’s interpretation with them.10 I have also, in the past, adapted Carolyn Hamilton’s Terrific Majesty, on changing ideas about the Zulu king Shaka from the 1820s to the present.11 What is excellent about this book is that it helps students to think about continuity and change in oral tradition. Hamilton demonstrates what happens when ideas and narratives move back and forth between oral and written mediums and how they can change over time, as well as how core messages can often survive for long periods. Her work helps students to enter this important debate on methodology from an analytical rather than a polemical position.

Learning through Music and Art Other sources for studying African pasts, especially for reaching authentic and accurate African self-­representations, are artistic and humanistic creations like music and art. For many students, however, two obstacles stand in the way of interpreting these kinds of sources. The first is the difficulty of escaping normative Western views of, for example, “primitive authentic” African art and African “world” music. The second is approximating the understanding of the producers and primary consumers of these artistic products so as to appreciate their meanings in a local context. Any student who has been through a museum knows that most African art is represented quite differently than, say, European fine art. Instead of the names of artists, artistic objects are usually labeled with the names of the “tribes” that used them. They are valued for their “authenticity” to an 118

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assumed ethnic norm and for their old age rather than for their individuality and innovativeness. They are also frequently displayed in museums completely removed from their original purpose, and frequently were not meant to be viewed at all! Something similar is at work with most African music that makes its way into our awareness. “Tribal” drumming and “traditional” instruments are favored over modern, cosmopolitan productions like those that appeal to African youth. Yet both art and music can be adopted as historical sources for understanding particular places and times when students learn to value them as creative acts in which innovation as well as tradition are valued. It may be useful to minimize “traditional ethnic art” like masks and focus instead on creative works to which students have not been exposed. Tshibumba Kanda Matulu’s popular paintings of Belgian colonialism and the decolonization era are a great example, and they are beautifully contextualized by Johannes Fabian and Bogumil Jewsiewicki in separate ethnographies that both interpret the meaning of the paintings and look at who bought and consumed them.12 Fabian goes so far as to suggest that Kanda Matulu is a kind of historian and that his art should be understood as a popular history of Congo. Just as African art is usually relegated to the “ethnic art” section of a museum, African music is often assigned to the realm of folklore and ethnomusicology at the margins of music departments. Jean Ngoya Kidula has written about this process of othering.13 She describes how Western society defines what is acceptable “African music” yet also marginalizes it. Music from Africa must be stereotypical in structures, forms, and practice to be deemed authentic. There is little serious debate about a “canon” of important works of African music, and individual composers—like individual African artists—are generally not studied in historical context. Kidula tries to help her students to escape this framing by having them identify the stereotypes of African music, often eliciting statements like “Africans have rhythm, African music is simple to learn—folk and primitive; African music involves dancing or movement—always vigorous; African music is tribal and entails face painting and jumping wildly; Africans have drums; . . . African music has been that way from time immemorial.”14 She then pre119

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sents music that often does not meet these requirements as an intervention into their preconception, before moving on to help her students contextualize songs in historical trends. Studying African music should probably involve listening to and thinking about actual pieces of music. Students can think about African globalism by listening to Zimbabwean roots rock guitar or West African highlife. They can learn about decolonization by studying southern and East African protest music, or about social movements by listening to Daniel Owino Misiani and Shirati Jazz’s “Jamoko Wange Tek” (A rich man is arrogant) or contemporary Senegalese hip-­hop. You can build lessons around these songs through an excellent guide to contemporary African music like Wolfgang Bender’s Sweet Mother.15 A wonderful source for students to read is chapter 5 of the musician and historian Jonathan Reynolds’s Sovereignty and Struggle, which locates incredible (and often unexpected) acts of African musical production and consumption within the struggle for independence and sovereignty.16

Learning through Novels and Films Like music, African novels and films provide an opportunity for students to encounter African perspectives on past events.17 As is beautifully chronicled in Africa Writes Back, the creation of a written African literary world in the late colonial and early independence period was an important chapter of the history of that era, as its literature was very much a way of “writing back” against colonial representations of the continent and its peoples.18 In many ways, then, studying African novels as primary texts ties them to the long history of the struggle for political, economic, and cultural decolonization. Kwaku Larbi Korang suggests that studying African novels is a way to understand “how Africa answers to the constraints of modernity, and how African writers carve out a place in the house that was not commodious to African literature.”19 The work of African authors writing around the period of decolonization represents a set of important ideas in a debate taking place over this period as to what independent African societies should look like.

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Can we see literature about the past as representative of the era it purports to cover, as well as the era in which it is written? Does African historical fiction contain a different kind of truth than a historical study, but one that is nevertheless valuable to our students? Students can seek answers to this question by learning about the background and motives of authors, their sources, and their understanding of their audience. In her classroom, Catherine Kroll undertakes just such a holistic approach to Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Biafran War novel, Half of a Yellow Sun.20 She begins with a historical and contemporary account of modern Nigeria as a backdrop and then screens the author’s ted talk, “The Danger of a Single Story,” in order to help students to understand her motives, worldview, and ideas about literature.21 These then become concepts and facts that students leverage in reading the book. In the process, they come to understand the book as an attempt to reproduce or recover not only a world of the past, but also a type of world making on the part of the author as artist. A similar approach is useful for the many African films set in the past. In fact, a number of African novelists, including Ousmane Sembène, at some point in their career turned to film as a more vernacular and popular medium than novels and brought their novelists’ sensibilities to their filmmaking. Sembène’s films, which deal with such topics as precolonial religion and politics (Ceddo), race and colonialism (Black Girl), and neo­ colonialism and corruption (Xala and Guelwaar), represent a particular fine set of interpretations of the West African past. The production of a new, eponymous film about Sembène’s life in 2017 presents additional opportunities to engage this material. Like novels, these films are best viewed by students who understand not only the period in which they are set but also the position from which Sembène was working. Other movies may similarly profit from dual contextualization. Your starting point in working with films in this way may be the film review section in the journal African Studies Review, but there are other guide texts that are useful—many of them published by Indiana University Press—like Josef Gugler’s African Film and Melissa Thackway’s Africa Shoots Back.22

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Doing It: Teaching Ousmane Sembène’s God’s Bits of Wood Sembène’s God’s Bits of Wood is both a wonderful read and a useful text for students. A semifictionalized account of the birth of the independence movement in Senegal, it reflects the struggle against colonialism through paradigms of race, gender, and class, allowing students to begin to ask questions about the identity of those who fought for Africans’ independence from colonizers. 23 God’s Bits of Wood can also be studied as an individual author’s proposition for what a future Africa might look like, reflecting its author’s socialist, feminist leanings developed through his youth in Casa­ mance, his labor in France, and his activism upon his return to Senegal. Between these universal and individual approaches, God’s Bits of Wood can be studied as a contribution to a debate occurring across Africa in the 1950s and 1960s about the shape of a new, independent society. This is how I teach the book. I start with two questions that I suggest were important in the debates of this period: Should we (Africans) strive for modernity or try to grasp tradition, and should we reach for equity or rather affluence (and hence socialism or capitalism)? I relate these questions to such issues as gender roles, labor organization, and religion. Together, I suggest to students that these were topics of conversation in churches and mosques, community organizations, courts and houses of authorities, and even around the everyday dinner table in this period in much of Africa. I then propose to students that they read the book as a series of encounters through which the author tries to propose resolutions to these debates. Sembène brings the French authorities Dejean, Leblanc, and Isnard together to ask about the character and legacy of colonialism. He positions young Ad’jibid’ji and Old Niakoro as a pair to explore the value of tradition, opposes Fa Keita and El Hadj Mabigué to question the value of spirituality and religion, and puts strikers and administrators in a room to argue whether the movement is about race or class. More than anything, however, he shows women—N’Deye Touti, Penda, Ramatoulaye—struggling to make a new world in which they can feature as actors and agents.

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Having assigned the book in a history class, my students generally assume that I expect them to read God’s Bits of Wood as “history” in the way they understand the rules of the discipline. They assume that the Women’s March that climaxes the book actually happened and that the railway strike that is its vehicle transformed easily into the nationalist movement. To complicate these assumptions, I also have them read Frederick Cooper’s article on the strike and on Senegalese reaction to Sembène’s depiction of it.24 This article points to disconnects between the historical evidence and the representation in God’s Bits of Wood, but in a way that frees the student to stop searching for “what happened” and to begin taking deeper value from the book. Jacques Depelchin suggests what that value may be: From [the striker’s] perspective, there is no doubt that the novelist’s account is closer to the reality of what happened than the historian’s, if only because the novelist was more interested in the daily lives of all those who were affected by the strike. The novel is not just about the strike, the event. Rather, the event is taken as an opportunity to let the reader see and hear, laugh and cry, in short to feel in unison with the people living under colonial rule, and to feel how they felt as they sought redress and justice from those (black and white) who were making a living out of humiliating, oppressing, and exploiting others.25

I take a slightly different approach than Depelchin. I argue that students should evaluate Sembène’s argument about what future African societies should construct by looking at the book through the frame of gender (what future for women?), class (and the role of labor unions), or heritage (tradition, religion, spirit). I assign them an essay in which I require them to put together evidence from the book, from what they have learned about the author’s background, and from lessons about the ideas and debates flowing around new states like those in West Africa in this period. In this way, I try to get them to use the skills and methods useful for mobilizing literature as a historical source to construct an interpretation of the novel that is true to Sembène’s time and place but that is also original and analytical.

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Conclusion There are, of course, many other types of sources and evidence that you can use in your classroom, each of which requires its own contextualization and critical methodology. Much of the appropriate methodology—from physical anthropology to archaeology to the colonial archive—is covered in Philips’s Writing African History and Falola’s Sources and Methods in African History, both of which I strongly recommend you read. In all of these cases, however, I find that students seem to learn best when they are not only instructed in concepts and methods, but actually given the opportunity to work with evidence firsthand. Your objectives for your students in terms of methodological skills may span a number of competencies, from appreciating the opportunities and limitations offered by different methodologies to actually practicing and applying them. I have, in the past, used several different learning outcomes related to these skills, some of which may be useful for you to consider:

4 Students should be able to evaluate the advantages and limi-

tations of different methods and approaches to studying the African past. 4 Students will critically engage scholarly studies of the African past by utilizing tools and primary sources at their disposal. 4 Students will apply evidence from the African and colonial “archive” and the “field,” and also beyond, to construct and defend accurate interpretations of the past.

As always, your outcomes will function as guides for the construction of learning and assessment activities. Building such activities to deliver new methods and skills for students is, I find, one of the most enjoyable tasks in constructing an African history course.

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The African History Course and the Other Digital Divide

This penultimate chapter investigates the possibilities and limitations of using digital tools, topics, and resources for teaching African history. I begin by looking at a digital divide, but not necessarily the one you expect. We usually speak of the digital divide in terms of Africans’ inability to access digital resources. However, most of the chapter will focus on a different divide: the impediments faced by Africans in producing and disseminating knowledge. Digital technology can provide opportunities for Africans to be innovators, consumers, and participants in the exchange and production of knowledge. Thus it has the potential to help students access information about Africa—often produced by Africans. Yet such opportunities are limited by the constraints that keep Africans from being equal producers and consumers of relevant digital knowledge: funding, infrastructure, technology distribution, the knowledge structure of the Internet, and the operation of online authority. These limitations in turn affect how we teach about African history in our classes. Thus

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it is principally the digital divide in production, rather than consumption, that makes it difficult for students of Africa to access accurate, significant, and relevant digital sources that present Africans’ views and knowledge. Partly in an attempt to overcome this divide, I try in this chapter to identify those archives and platforms representing African perspectives and experiences that do exist and that can help you to begin to bridge the digital divide in your African history courses. I will also try to relate the relative paucity of such sources, especially those produced by Africans, to broader issues of equity. In fact, I hope that this chapter provides a great access point into important ethical and analytical questions of inequality with the goal of eventually reducing the distance between students in the United States and their counterparts in Africa and provide U.S. students with direct, contemporary African perspectives on the past and the present. You may or may not want to tackle this topic in your classes. Missing from this chapter is any discussion of the principal libraries of digitized books, articles, and periodicals that make up the core scholarly infrastructure of our field and discipline. Most instructors (and students) are already familiar with jstor, ebsco (Academic Search), and LexisNexis, and it seems inefficient to spend a lot of time on those databases. A second topic that is not directly really covered in this chapter is the politics and logistics of producing your own digital resources for studying and learning African history. This kind of creation is, of course, something that I hope you will consider doing as part of your research processes, but there is not really space to address it in this volume. Fortunately, there are some pretty good texts on the subject. One of the best is African Studies in the Digital Age: DisConnects?, put together by some leading practitioners— especially librarians—and published by Brill.1 A few people and institutions deserve mention briefly in this introduction because of their contributions to the production and dissemination of digital resources and tools in African studies. Chief among them are the folks at Michigan State University (msu), including Peter Limb in the msu library, as well as the hardworking staff at codesria, the Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa. These groups represent the gold standard in creating resources on Africa that are produced with 126

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African participation and that successfully convey African views and perspectives.

The Digital Divide in Africa I start here with a story about a 2015 Rwandan government study of their digital strategy that eminently illustrates the complexity of the digital divide in Africa. As far as government officials knew, the Rwandan government had done everything right over the previous fifteen years. At the turn of the new millennium, they had authored a Vision 2020 plan to provide broadband Internet access for almost the entire population of the country. A great deal of energy was poured into achieving this goal. As a result, by 2015, more than 98 percent of the Rwandan population had been offered coverage. The government had negotiated for cheaper access through an Internet exchange point established in 2009. This strategy had successfully reduced access prices almost to the 5 percent of monthly income benchmark established by the United Nations Broadband Commission. Yet as 2016 began, only a quarter of the Rwandan population was online, and only 10 percent had adopted high-­speed mobile broadband. Some Rwandans cited high price as an obstacle to its adoption, but others seemed to point to a lack of interest, which they attributed, in turn, to the absence of locally significant content. Sure, a person with broadband in Ruhengeri could look up the best Chinese restaurant in New York in a second, but could they find a good map of nearby Busengo, or reviews of doctors in Kigali? The obstacles impeding adoption of Internet access within Rwanda demonstrate the intricacy of the questions facing Africans in the digital age. These challenges are usually discussed through the paradigm of a digital divide: a gap between those who have consistent and stable access to computers and the Internet, and those who do not. Clearly, it is of great concern that Africans continue to be digital have-­nots in an age in which productivity and knowledge are increasingly tied to digital technology. Yet the emphases of studies of the digital divide have changed over time. Some studies, especially in early years, emphasized Africans’ general lack of access to digital technology and the Internet, pointing out gaps in both national and continental infrastructure and in the ownership of personal devices. 127

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But some later studies focused on the difficulty facing Africans in developing competencies and skills. Still others also suggest that the contents and structure of the Internet are not oriented to the needs of Africans. Together, these newer studies point to the difficulties facing Africans as producers of knowledge, and to obstacles to the acceptance and dissemination of information and resources they may produce.2 As a topic in African history, the roots of the digital divide can be historicized in the context of the colonial and postcolonial history of the continent. By looking closely at these periods, it is possible to see the development of a vast differential in technology between Africans and Europeans. We can study the stultification of productivity during the era of the Atlantic slave trade, the colonial process by which indigenous African technologies were slowly replaced by imported goods. We can teach students about the difficulties Africans faced as information producers in the colonial period, struggling to overcome a paucity of printing presses and distribution routes for news and other publications, and even the way that “aid” has worked in the twentieth century to position Africans outside the role of technology producers. Beyond introducing the roots of the digital divide as a topic of historical inquiry, however, we can also help students to connect this marginalization of Africans as knowledge producers to the challenge we face in finding digital tools and archives, especially those produced by Africans, for the African history classroom. The number and availability of such tools contrast dramatically with courses on European and U.S. history. While we can therefore make use of a limited set of digital resources and tools that do exist, their severely limited scope, content, and availability are products of the very history our students have been studying!

Online Archives and Content Some digital resources our students can use to access African voices and perspectives are online archives of written, visual, and audio sources. Written documents from the African past can increasingly be found online and can form a good basis for student research, project-­based learning, and primary source analysis in class. Some of these collections are available from 128

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major African studies and allied programs at universities with large African studies centers and programs. The best are curated collections like Africa South of the Sahara, long managed by Karen Fung at Stanford University.3 These websites are two starting places for both instructors and students looking for information, including primary sources. The Stanford website is searchable by topic and country, and in most cases it includes short but useful descriptions. Other institutions with online catalogs or curated collections include the Africa Center at the University of Pennsylvania, the African Studies Center at the University of Leiden, African Studies at Columbia University, the Mayibuye Archive at the University of the Western Cape, and the Nordic Africa Institute in Uppsala.4 Note that, in keeping with the general distribution of scholarly resources, most of these collections are hosted by universities in North America or Europe. Very few African national archives have made large amounts of digital content available online. This is due in large part to resource availability and logistical issues. Most African national archives do profess a desire to digitize at least some records, and many have plans to do so. They have been encouraged by the International Federation of Library Associations (ifla) and the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (unesco), which have called for governments to “bridge the digital divide” in order to “enable citizens to participate in life-­long learning and education.”5 Not everyone sees the digitization of African archives as unproblematic, however. The South African scholar Premesh Lalu, among others, has called for Africans to practice a “politics of digitisation” in which they monitor and discuss what gets digitized, who makes the decision to digitize a source, and who benefits from digitization.6 Most African newspapers have an online presence, and many of their stories are aggregated and to some degree archived by All Africa.7 These are among the most recent written sources for the study of Africa. Among the oldest are manuscripts collected and preserved in Timbuktu, some of which are presented in Ancient Manuscripts from the Desert Libraries of Mali, an online exhibit of the Library of Congress; Aluka’s Timbuktu Manuscripts site; and in a beautiful digital document put out by the South Africa-­Mali Project.8 129

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The archives and curated collections available for students of African history are increasingly multimedia. One of the best of these collections is the product of a relationship between matrix (the Center for Digital Humanities and Social Sciences) and the African Studies Center, both at Michigan State University, in collaboration with organizations in Africa. Called the aodl: African Online Digital Library, this collection provides access to well-­developed and durable resources mostly focused on West and southern Africa.9 These include interviews with Muslim men and women in Ghana, ajami manuscripts from West Africa, and the West African Online Digital Library as well as the South African Film and Video Project and African Activist Archive. Many of these sites parallel the interests of msu-­based scholars, but often they were produced through collaborations in which African institutions and researchers took the lead. Several interesting image databases also provide resources for instructors and possible analytical exercises for students. Africa Cartoons, a site begun and moderated from the University of Wisconsin, presents examples of political and public-­facing cartoons from around Africa. Some of these cartoons are organized into exhibitions. All provide a window into public sentiments about contemporary Africa and the recent past. The Atlantic Slave Trade and Slave Life in the Americas: A Visual Record is curated by Jerome Handler and Michael Tuite at the University of Virginia.10 Their over 1,200 images are all well documented and contextualized, frequently shocking and revealing, and include maps, pictures of everyday life, plantation scenes, early ethnographic images, and more. Other online resources are digitized maps, especially those that are well designed so as to accurately convey important information. A number of contemporary maps of Africa can be found at the Washington Post website The State of Africa.11 This map-­based site aggregates data on contemporary types of government, business climate rankings, legal frameworks for same-­sex relationships, access to the Internet and to primary education, and more. However, they are accompanied by little contextualization. The Perry-­Castañeda Library at the University of Texas provides historical European-­produced maps of Africa online, some dating back as far as the seventeenth century.12 130

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Many instructors also use videos in class, some of which have already been mentioned in earlier chapters. YouTube and similar sites often provide access to African-­produced material. Some videos provide interesting ways to complicate or bring into question key narratives that students encounter. Christine Saidi, for example, shares YouTube videos of Ugandan views on the Kony 2012 campaign. Historical pieces from African television channels and music videos can also be quite useful. In discussing the Battle of Adwa, for example, I ask students to contrast an interview with the historian Raymond Jonas from Ethiopian tv with Teddy Afro’s music video for “Tikur Sew,” which contains an extended depiction of the battle.13 These are two very different ways to depict this key event in African history, and together they facilitate all kinds of conversations about the relevance of history, its uses for the present, and the relationship between historians’ work and heritage. As an added bonus, the comments posted for both ­videos help students to understand Ethiopians’ contemporary contest over this history and its politics. Another online tool for helping students to develop the skills of thinking like a historian is H-Net, some of whose earliest networks were Africa-­ focused. Few instructors recommend that undergraduate students become members or pose questions on such networks as H-Africa or H-West-­Africa, but some do assign specific research projects that begin with searches of these networks.14 A number of archived H-Net discussions give students a sense of the field as an intellectual forum of constructive debate. Many students prefer such websites as Wikipedia, which seem to be fonts of authoritative information rather than messy debates like those on H-Net, although more experienced students have often heard words of caution from their professors, some of whom have banned the site as a source. While every instructor will have his or her own policy, I find that Wikipedia can be a limited, useful tool for some very technically minded students. I ask these students to examine the history of revisions on particular pages by using the “view history” tabs. In this way, they can visualize contests over the past and its uses. This only really works well with students who are quite technologically savvy and on controversial wikis about topics such as “Belgian Congo” and “Cecil Rhodes.” 131

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Two other digital tools deserve mention for their utility in learning activities. The first is AfricaMap, a multiyear project led by a Harvard professor, Suzanne P. Blier.15 AfricaMap is actually meant as a tool for scholarly, interdisciplinary collaboration, but it allows instructors and students to create their own maps by using primary sources or physical remains, where location is known. It also has a large number of prepopulated overlays, so that a map can display trade routes, political boundaries, ethnolinguistic and religious groups, data on conflict or economic opportunity ratings, population density, heritage sites, and demographic and environmental information. Importantly, historical maps of the continent can also be overlaid onto the background map. Although the site does not yet have a teaching apparatus built around it, instructors can use it to illustrate important lessons. Another really useful tool is Africa Is a Country, a blog that focuses on critical media analyses, usually from a postcolonial position.16 Among its lead contributors whose posts I find most useful are Daniel Magaziner and Marissa Moorman. Africa Is a Country is the first place I suggest students turn when they want to understand some event in the news from beyond the accepted media narratives. Some of its posts are very much meant to encourage intellectual debate, especially those that interrogate the impact of important scholars like Frantz Fanon or Mahmood Mamdani. Others take a critical approach to interpreting xenophobia, the relationship between China and Africa, and pressing issues on college campuses in Africa.

Doing It: Using Africa Past and Present as a Learning Tool Like video, audio can be a powerful tool for enabling students to access African perspectives and voices. Podcasts, for example, can play an important role in the classroom. Several narrative African history podcasts are available through iTunes, although to my mind none of them can satisfactorily serve in a textbook or auxiliary role. By contrast, the excellent Africa Past and Present podcast has the power to connect students to scholars, many of them African, and to the history they study. Hosted by the indefatigable Peter Limb and Peter Alegi at msu, its episodes are scholarly ­inquiries into just about everything—conflict, politics, religion, gender, 132

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b­ iographies of Africans great and small, intellectuals, labor, and more. Done in a conversational format, they can help students to understand not only historical events and processes but also the work of the historian (and scholars in allied fields).17 I find that assigning these podcasts gives students a welcome break from written texts. My students also retain and understand their contents quite well, especially when the podcast is used in tandem with other kinds of sources. There are a number of strategies for designing learning units and assessment around Africa Past and Present. Certainly, you could let students choose their own episodes to listen to and review, which may provoke ideas for research projects. I tend to be more particular and assign specific podcasts to the whole class. An excellent example is Episode 65: “A Female King: Gender and Oral History in Eastern Nigeria.”18 In this interview, Nwando Achebe relates the story of Ahebi Ugbabe, the only known female warrant chief in colonial Nigeria. It’s an incredible story, told much more briefly than in the much longer book Achebe wrote on the subject and thus more accessible to students. Even more important, the interview format moves seamlessly from the story itself to issues of methodology (especially oral history), the complexities of Igbo conceptions of gender, and the impact of colonialism. When I use Africa Past and Present or other podcasts in the classroom, I frequently ask students to respond to a set of questions that I have drawn up beforehand. Some of these questions relate to the topic of the interview, but several also ask them to critically assess the interview format and to consider why Limb and Alegi ask certain questions, or how the interviewee chose to respond to these questions. I try to get students to understand the interview (and the production of history more broadly) as a conversation between scholars, critics, and the public. The episode with Nwando Achebe, for example, allows me to ask about why Achebe felt driven to write about a female warrant chiefly officeholder, which aspects of colonialism she and the hosts chose to emphasize, and the assertions made about the use of oral history as a source. Because these issues are entangled with a really good story, students generally respond to them successfully, and I can then draw them into the wider course material I present on these topics. 133

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Digital Teaching Tools The African historians with whom I consulted for this book almost all volunteered that they try to include digital assets and archives in their classes, often citing such resources as H-Africa and Africa Past and Present. Yet while they could each point to at least one basic digital resource, together we could only identify a small number of really excellent and well-­ developed digital teaching tools for the African history classroom. The relatively few complex, pedagogy-­oriented digital projects that we found are generally funded or developed by North American universities. Often, however, they were developed in collaboration with African scholars and institutions. Several are teaching units produced through the history department and library at msu, especially Teaching South African History in a Digital Age.19 This collection is built around the excellent multimedia South Africa: Overcoming Apartheid, Building Democracy website that includes videos, images, and written documents framed by scholarly essays and learning units, all focused on the struggle against apartheid.20 Most important, Overcoming Apartheid includes worksheets for students that are tied to interviews, photographs, and written documents. It also links to the independent South African History Archive, which contains a series of documents and sources from the struggle against apartheid in the 1980s, each paired with a guide booklet for educators. The result is a fantastic learning experience for this particular unit of African history. Another similarly holistic digital resource is Voyages: The Transatlantic Slave Trade Database.21 This web portal allows students to access an enormous data set on slave voyages—routes, origins, nations of participants, embarkation and disembarkation of captives. Students can conduct their own queries and view results as tables, graphs, or maps. The site also includes a series of carefully drawn maps, contextualizing essays by David Eltis, and primary sources including images and contemporary written accounts from Ayuba Suleiman Diallo, Catherine Zimmermann-­Mulgrave, and a liberated African named Dodo. It also includes lesson plans, although mostly at the high school level.

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These tools share the distinction of being holistic, providing tools for teaching (as well as research). Although there are not many digital resources like them, a few more are coming online as I write. The unesco Women in Africa portal is one that has potential.22 It is composed of modules focusing on women as diverse as the seventh-­century Algerian Queen Kahina, Yaa Asantewa, and the contemporary artists and activists Cesária Évora and Miriam Makeba. At the time of writing, unfortunately, most have not yet been completed.

Conclusion It is clear that there are not enough high-­quality digital learning tools designed specifically for African history courses. Hopefully, this will change in the future. One potentially useful brand new tool for crossing the digital divide in your classroom is A Liberian Journey: History, Memory, and the Making of a Nation, cosponsored by the Liberian Center for National Documents and Records Agency and a number of American organizations.23 At one level this is just a very well-­contextualized archive of materials from a 1926 Harvard expedition to Liberia, carried out on behalf of the Firestone Tire and Rubber Company. The themes that emerge from the film, photographs, and diaries left by the expedition, ripe for student research, include both Liberian history and the attitudes of Western scientists toward Africans in the period. But there is another level to the project. The project designers, led by Gregg Mitman and Philomena Bloh Sayeh, are actively engaging Liberians to contribute content of their own, including their memories, records of their activism, and physical evidence. If they succeed, this will be a model project for public history and, in the process, become an incredibly valuable teaching tool. The paucity of these kinds of modules and tools is evidence of the continuing equity issue of the digital divide. But it should also be an impetus for you, should you devise units and learning experiences, to share these online in ways that encourage participation and engagement from both students and scholars in Africa and around the world.

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4^ Chapter Ten 64

Bringing It All Together

As I volunteered way back in the introduction to part I of this book, the first African history courses that I taught were not really designed at all. Fresh out of grad school, with an expertise in two small regions of nineteenth-­century Africa and a cursory familiarity of the broader field through reading, I did not have the know-­how or the time to design anything more than a rudimentary tour of the continent. I borrowed notes from friends to form the skeleton of the two surveys in my African history sequence (thank you forever, John Parker!) and then filled in the gaps with material extracted from monographs and articles that I thought were important and textbooks that I desperately mined for information. In the years that followed, I gradually learned about student learning outcomes and “alignment” and other concepts that sounded like buzzwords but seemed at their base to make sense. I haphazardly improved my courses to reflect what seemed to be the needs of my students and the changing nature of the field. Still, it was not until 2009 that I really began to think about

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redesigning my courses around a coherent set of objectives so that every activity—from the first day of class to the final exam—built forward from a coherent set of student-­centered goals. Two more years went by before I built a new course—focused on methodology in African history—that was designed that way from the beginning. I can now say that this more intentional way of designing a class has had measurable results: My students tend to do better in my classes, and when I see them again (often in a senior seminar) they are better prepared with the research competencies, analytical skills, and critical engagement that I want to see in individuals about to graduate with a history degree. Whether you are designing a course for the first time or redesigning a well-­worn offering, my advice to you is to begin by assessing students’ needs and deciding what you want them to learn and achieve through the course: hence the emphasis on learning outcomes in just about every chapter in this volume. No two courses are exactly alike, and part of the strength of our field lies in diversity. We do tend to share some goals and outcomes, however. Most of us want to create classes that meet the particular needs of our own student population (chapter 1). We would like to provide some sort of sustained intervention into students’ understandings of not only Africa, but also the history major and the world in which they live (chapter 2). The kind of learning we want to provide in our surveys covers broad areas of space, time, and African populations, but we also want to guide students to “uncover” the complexities, subtleties, and depths of that history (chapters 3–­6). We want them to learn how to ask questions and investigate different types of evidence, and also to interject ethical considerations into their scholarly work and consumption of media about Africa (chapters 7 and 8). We try to find ways to enable them to use a variety of tools, including new technologies, to engage African perspectives on the past and present (chapter 9). By putting all of these pieces together, we hope to build a course that helps students not only to gain knowledge, but also to critically interrogate what they have learned and create accurate, authentic, and meaningful narratives from the evidence before them. In this final chapter, I briefly explore different ways to put together the pieces of an African history course. I begin by revisiting how to construct 138

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learning outcomes as part of the process of building a course syllabus. I discuss some ways to begin and end the class as well as to select teaching formats, including some high-­impact practices. I also feature examples of unusual and interesting learning experiences designed by colleagues around the country. Finally, I briefly touch on some strategies for assessing student learning and for closing the class. In each case, I only provide guidelines to help you think about these elements of the course. Which strategies and formats you ultimately select is up to you.

From Outcomes to Syllabus Throughout this book, we have discussed the setting of learning outcomes for students as a key step in intentional course design. Such goals serve not only as guides for course material, but also as important tools to help students to understand what they are supposed to be learning. The five or six student learning outcomes that I develop for each of my classes usually reflect a wide range of skills, knowledge, and philosophical considerations. Your learning outcomes will, of course, differ from mine based on your own goals, your students’ needs, and the material you want to cover. Whatever outcomes you decide on, however, they should align with the contents of the course. There are all kinds of tools for doing this kind of alignment, but I tend to think the best way to proceed is just to build a syllabus, making sure that each element of the syllabus corresponds with the outcomes that you developed. The heart of any syllabus is the explanation of topics to be addressed in (and between) each class session. Usually, this takes the form of a list or set of statements about places, people, periods, and themes. In a class that is just centered on delivering historical knowledge this is not too hard to develop. Explicitly addressing additional goals, such as skills and methodologies, philosophy, and ethics, makes it more difficult. If you are building a unit on the Bantu migration that is also about questioning the notion of ethnicity and teaching students a bit about historical linguistics, for example, you have a lot of information to deliver. If you are developing a unit on the Rwandan genocide that more broadly addresses conflict and resolution and includes a palaver exercise and a workshop on the concept 139

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of “tribe,” you will need to find a way to identify each activity and tell students how to prepare. Putting all of this information in the syllabus may seem overkill, but it also has the potential to help students understand how the course works right from the first day of class. Typically, the syllabus is also built out with additional information about the resources available to students, a sense of how their work will be assessed. Both assessment techniques and class resources have been introduced throughout this volume, but the section on assessment below might help you to develop an overall strategy that matches your learning outcomes. You might also want to turn your syllabus into some kind of invitation to learn. This kind of student-­centered syllabus might include not only the learning outcomes in bullet point or paragraph form, but also descriptions and explanations for the units in the course, the readings, and the assessment activities. Together, these might set out a narrative for the course that students can ingest before classes even begin, or that you can describe on the first day of class. Admittedly, some instructors prefer to let students uncover the narrative of the course week by week, rather than foreshadowing it. But in an African history course, where so much is unfamiliar and our task is so much more than just to convey content, a more intentional structure may be required. Similarly, because of the controversial and sometimes disturbing nature of the material we cover, one possibly important tool for students might be a set of behavioral expectations for the class. This statement might cover what students can expect from the instructor and how you expect them to interact with each other, participate, and complete assignments. It might focus on expectations for maintaining an identity-­safe classroom through discussion and assessment and your own or university-­ produced documents on plagiarism, behavior, and access. Your syllabus may also incorporate a set of learning aids for students. These might include definitions of key terms or explanations of theoretical frameworks, a list of outside resources and how to access them, and even assignment grading rubrics, should you wish to share these with students. You might also add your own biography or teaching/research philosophy so that students understand where you are coming from and why you are 140

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taking the approach you have chosen. You may want to take the opportunity the syllabus provides to share why you chose each textbook, reading, or other resource, what you expect students to gain from them, and how students will be assessed on the material they cover. Together, these kinds of learning aids help contribute to a student-­centered syllabus that gives students a sense of the class as a holistic experience from beginning to end.

The First Day and the Last Day One way to help ensure that your course is cohesive and aligns with your objectives from beginning to end is to design the first day and the last day of class at the same time. In doing so, you can match activities and lessons to the goals you have identified for the class and then use them to book-­ end the learning that takes place throughout the semester. The first day of class is your opportunity to introduce students to what they will be doing all semester. What is the scope of the course, and to what content will you be introducing students? What skills will they learn? What lessons do you expect them to take away? Perhaps most important, why is this material necessary for them to learn as students and citizens? You might give this information to them in the form of a lecture or by having them read or watch and interact with some material. I have already shared my strategies for the first day of class in earlier chapters, but here are some others. Christine Saidi begins her class with YouTube clips that demonstrate our typical conceptions of Africa and some African responses. She often includes “Feed the Children” videos and other calls for “aid” to Africa, for example, as well as responses from Dambisa Moyo and Paul Kagame.1 Sarah Zimmerman does something similar by pairing Binyavanga Wainaina’s “How to Write about Africa” with Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s “The Danger of a Single Story.”2 In both cases, they use these resources to support learning outcomes aimed at helping students learn to critically question assumptions about the continent and its people. The first day of the course also presents the instructor with an opportunity to learn about the students and, in the process, help students to learn about themselves. Jennifer Coffman, in her article “Introducing ‘Africa,’ ” recommends beginning Africa-­focused courses with a short quiz consisting 141

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of two sets of questions.3 The first set is focused on what students bring to the class. Questions cover issues of knowledge (“How many countries are there in Africa?”) as well as perceptions of the continent (“Why are some government officials in Africa corrupt?”) and students’ own conceptions of where they are in the world (“Is ‘text’ a noun or a verb?”). These questions introduce students to the kinds of issues that will be raised in the course, and also give the instructor valuable insight into the knowledge and ideas with which students enter the class. The second set of questions asks students to think about their answers to the first set, asking them to consider how much certainty they had in their original responses, which questions require “expertise” or an expert to answer, where they might find information to strengthen their answers, and which responses might be based on false assumptions. This exercise not only signals to students the kinds of interventions they will experience in the course, but also begins them on their learning pathway. Whereas most instructors think very carefully about the first day of class, we often reach the end of a course in a headlong rush to finish our material, mentor students trying to pull their projects together, or prepare them for the questions that will be on the final exam. Yet like the first day, the last day is a critical component of a course. It is the moment when the instructor can help students to pull together the information, skills, and ideas of the semester and to lay the groundwork for further learning. It is also a moment in which the instructor can evaluate the course and begin to find places to make improvements for future semesters. One way to accomplish both of these goals is to consciously ask students to look back on the first day of class and on the learning outcomes identified on the syllabus. Read them out loud. Discuss how and where in the course each outcome was introduced, and what material and assignments addressed it. Perhaps have students meet in groups to discuss the class and come up with some suggestions. Alternately, go over the readings, images, sound, or video introduced on the first day and ask how they view that material now, and how their understanding differs from the first day of the course. By consciously planning the last day of the course, you can make sure that

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it is not merely downstream from the first day, but actually helps to constitute a holistic set of lessons.

What Is the Format? In between the first and the last day, you will have to decide how to convey to students the skills and materials you want them to have and to empower their curiosity and learning. Traditionally, of course, the mainstay format of a course has been the lecture. More recently, however, many instructors have adopted active learning approaches. Active learning models ask us to turn much of the responsibility for learning over to students and to take more of a supporting role. Instructors are asked to fill their classroom with activities, rather than lectures. This strategy is controversial, of course, and you will have to evaluate its benefits and costs for your own class. To what extent does either active learning or lecturing help support your student outcomes? Does either method better address the unique package of knowledge acquisition, organization of evidence into a conceptual framework, and the lifelong retrieval and application of skills and knowledge that your course offers? Although each instructor has to make her own decision, there is quite a bit of evidence that incorporating active learning into the classroom is generally more effective than a purely lecture-­based approach. One 2014 meta-­ analysis of 225 studies of courses in the science and technology fields, for example, showed that students in an active learning setting demonstrated significantly improved learning, skills acquisition, and retention.4 Moreover, lecturing may be particularly ill-­suited to the objectives of an African history course. In What’s the Use of Lectures? Donald Bligh argues that lectures are particularly good at confirming the ideas and knowledge students already have but are poor at promoting critical thinking and problem solving.5 Most students simply seem to learn better when they are doing than when they are merely listening. Yet it is not clear that this is evidence that we should abandon the lecture format entirely. I find that lectures are still an efficient way to introduce a concept or to highlight and frame a debate before entering into

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the scholarly sources or evidence. They are also a useful place to sum up or bring material together. Whenever I tried to teach units completely without lectures, I found that some students flounder and are not able to put the pieces together as well. Perhaps others have found that they can completely abandon the lecture, but I have not. Possibly, what is needed in your course is some mix of lectures and other activities, in which the different types of learning reinforce each other in coherent units. Such complex units can frame and summarize material while still giving students range to explore, think critically, and create their own narratives. Active learning strategies that complement lectures include inclass readings and group discussions, individual and collaborative research projects, and debates as well as problem-­based and community-­based learning. Below, I describe a few learning projects that creative African historians have been willing to share with me. Most of them mix lectures with active learning. Many culminate in performative projects, reflecting the emphasis on memory and performance-­based interpretations of the past that we encounter in many of the societies we study. Cymone Fourshey, for example, builds a performative assignment into a lesson on electricity and modernization. Her students read and discuss an article on hip-­hop in Africa as well as Catherine Coquery-­Vidrovitch’s study of electricity networks, taken from Sources and Methods in African History.6 Fourshey then divides students into groups and assigns each group a paragraph of the article. She instructs the groups to come up with a summary in rap form for the paragraph, essentially reformulating Coquery-­Vidrovitch’s work into a performative format. Kwasi Konadu similarly distributes students into groups to develop poems based on lessons in earlier African history. He uses this project to gender the course, beginning with readings and lectures on conceptions of gender in the time being studied. He then asks male students to write an authentic poem from a woman’s perspective and vice versa. These poems are presented to the class and are discussed within a summary lesson for the unit. I do something similar with students when we work with the Sundiata epic. I first contextualize what we know about the region and its people in 144

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the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. I then assign D. T. Niane’s version of the story and read aloud excerpts from other versions, some of which are in poetic form.7 Throughout, we discuss archetypal notions of males and females represented in these narratives. Finally, I ask students to construct poems in forms similar to those they have read but focused on a minor character in the stories. Students perform these poems for each other and critique and discuss them. Debates are another important active learning opportunity. At the University of the Western Cape in South Africa, the History Department built its first-­year courses around topics in South African (and sometimes African or global) history, each of which features a number of debates between faculty members with student participation. One of the department’s objectives is to overturn the kind of rote learning and acceptance of teacher authority still featured in most South African high school history programs. Students are encouraged to contribute arguments based not only on their readings for the class but also on knowledge they may bring from outside the classroom. The debates between faculty punctuate these lessons and demonstrate the contested nature of historical knowledge.8 Elisabeth McMahon also uses debates as an active learning tool. For example, she teaches the 1976 Soweto protests partly by having students read newspaper accounts. However, she gives half of the class articles from newspapers largely read by white South Africans, and the other half articles from newspapers serving the black South African community. She then asks each group to figure out what happened leading up to and during the protests and to share these accounts with the class. Inevitably, she says, students will interrupt each other’s presentations and a debate will ensue. At some point, students figure out why their accounts differ, thereby learning a valuable lesson about the nature of knowledge as well as the events of 1976. Not every active learning experience has to be quite this dramatic. Corrie Decker has a discussion every week in her African history survey course. She ensures students do the reading by quizzing them on one day, and she then builds on these quizzes with discussions of the same set of readings. These classes begin as free conversation within groups, followed by a classwide discussion. Because this pattern is repeated every week, students come 145

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to understand and anticipate how the course works and can practice participation. Some activities extend outside of class time. Maxim Matusevich’s approach to his survey course emphasizes connections to the community. From the first day, he invites students to go beyond the confines of the auditorium and to participate in extracurricular activities like attending museums, film festivals, guest lectures, and performances. For my own class, even when there are not any relevant events, I at least can encourage them to attend African art exhibits at San Francisco museums. However, community-­engaged activities are not always easy to arrange for African history classes. Fortunately, collaborative projects can increasingly be done online. Benjamin Ray describes how, in the 1990s, he wanted to enable his religion students at the University of Virginia to wrestle with issues surrounding the production and exhibition of African art. In 1996, he began to call upon students to design their own online exhibitions in which they pulled together material from lectures and readings with visits to museums and library-­based research.9 He based his project on one at Wellesley College where students set up physical exhibitions of African art. Because his students did not have the access to physical space and objects, he instead led them to produce a virtual exhibition in which they would develop didactics, decide how to exhibit the objects, and in the process learn about issues surrounding knowledge production and curation in their field. All of these activities usually work best when they are well supported by lectures, course materials, and assessment tools in an active classroom ­environment. Cynthia Brame of Vanderbilt University’s Center for Teaching has produced a useful, research-­driven guide for active classroom learning called “Flipping the Classroom.”10 The two terms are not precisely the same, and “flipped classroom” has become too much of a buzzword for me to use it myself. However, the key elements of a flipped classroom, as explained by Brame, seem to be promising guidelines for active learning activities:

4 Students should first be exposed to some kind of material about the subject prior to the activity: whether through readings, videos, or other resources. 146

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4 They should also be given an incentive to prepare for the activity, usually in the form of a task that is assessed.

4 Moreover, they should be assessed at various points in the unit or

project so that the instructor can adjust the lesson as it goes along.

4 Finally, the in-class activities should not just be about knowledge acquisition, but also about cognitive activities.

I would add, finally, that the instructor should continually refer back to the learning outcomes to make sure that the activity is advancing students to their goals.

Assessment I conclude this chapter, and this volume, by briefly raising a few points about assessment. Like flipping the classroom and student learning outcomes, assessment is something that often appears to instructors to be a buzzword deployed by administrators seeking conformity or increased ­bureaucracy. But assessment is also a practice that we pursue in every class and something that it is better to do well than to do poorly, so it is worth discussing briefly. We can begin by reflecting briefly on the reasons to practice assessment. Assessment allows us to evaluate students’ work and assign grades, of course, but it can also be used by the instructor to modify the curriculum (both during and between courses) or to identify which students need extra support. Not the least important role of assessment is that it allows the instructor to evaluate whether students’ learning does, in fact, meet the objectives of the course, or if changes need to be made. One way to begin the design of assessment activities to meet these goals is to carefully consider what is to be assessed. Different assignments may be variously aimed to evaluate whether students are able to recall facts and basic ideas, grasp important concepts, apply skills and competencies, construct critical arguments, or create narratives from evidence. Assignments may also be tailored to specific levels of mastery. Simple quizzes may motivate students to read and can test their comprehension, whereas more complex exams can assess their skills development and comprehension. 147

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Larger multistep assignments may help the instructor to assess research and methodological skills, understanding of the material, and analytical competency at the same time. One of my favorite African history assignments is a four-­part writing project that Lisa Lindsay gives to her students. Her objective is not only to get students to work with primary sources dealing with African history, but also to give them practice in writing research papers, a skill that is one goal of her course. Lindsay begins with a list of potential primary sources that she shares with her students. Students choose a source and are then asked to envision it as an artifact and to analyze its history from its creation to the present day. In the first step of the assignment, students research the provenance of a document and contextualize the authors’ perspectives and purpose. Lindsay then asks students to historicize the document more broadly in the time and place of its conception. The third stage is the construction of a critical historiography that charts how scholars have used the document and discussed the events and people described in it. Students are required to contextualize this historiography within the changing nature of scholarship about Africa. Finally, students must draw these pieces together to construct an original analysis of the meaning of the primary source. At each stage, Lindsay provides rubrics for the assignments so that there are no surprises for students—they know exactly on what factors they will be evaluated. At most institutions, just as instructors assess students’ learning and achievement, students also have an opportunity to evaluate the course. If you are like me, you have mixed feelings about student evaluations. Sometimes, they produce important insights, but often they merely become a data set of students’ likes and dislikes. Fortunately, formal student evaluations are actually merely one type of evidence you can use for assessing the course and considering changes. You can also informally survey your students on specific issues during the course and consider their grades and responses to questions to see whether they are actually learning what you intend for them to learn. You can also, of course, look at colleagues’ syllabi for good ideas. However you do it, assessment of the course at the end of

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the semester is an important task, and it is most easily carried out when the entire class is aligned with a set of outcomes and goals. Because assessment is so important, I would like to offer you a chance to assess this book. I set out to write A Primer for Teaching African History that would be a lukasa—a map or guide to the creation or revision of African history courses. Did I succeed? I would love to hear your feedback and ideas.

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4^ Notes 64

Introduction 1 The main source for this discussion of the lukasa is Mary Nooter Roberts and Allen F. Roberts, eds., Memory: Luba Art and the Making of History (New York: Museum for African Art, 1996). 2 “Introduction,” in Nooter Roberts and Roberts, Memory, 37. 3 Thomas Q. Reefe, “A Luba Memory Device,” African Arts 10 (1977): 48–­50.

One. A Place to Begin 1 Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart (London: Heinemann, 1962). 2 Adam Hochschild, King Leopold’s Ghost (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1998); Martin Meredith, The Fortunes of Africa: A 5000-Year History of Wealth, Greed, and Endeavor (New York: Public Affairs, 2014). 3 I appreciate feedback from two high school teachers, whose names have been left off this citation at their request, and from fellow presenters and audiences at panels on teaching African history that were on the programs of the 2010 African Studies Association and 2011 American Historical Association annual conferences. 4 Joel Samoff, “Triumphalism, Tarzan, and Other Influences: Teaching about Africa in the 1990s,” in Patricia Alden, David Lloyd, and Ahmed Samatar, eds., African Studies and the Undergraduate Curriculum (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 1994), 36, 35–­84. 5 Binyavanga Wainaina, “How to Write about Africa,” Granta 92 (2008), http://​ granta​.com​/How​-­­to-Write-­about-­Africa/. 6 As an example of the videos they watch, see “Moving Windmills: The William Kamkwamba Story,” posted February 14, 2008, YouTube, https://​www​.youtube​ .com​/watch​?v​=a​ rD374MFk4w.

n ot es to c h a p t er o n e 7 Curtis Keim, Mistaking Africa: Curiosities and Inventions of the American Mind, 2nd ed. (Philadelphia: Westview, 2009); Jonathan T. Reynolds, “So Many Africas, So Little Time: Doing Justice to Africa in the World History Survey,” World History Connected 2 (2004), http://​worldhistoryconnected​ .press​.illinois​.edu​/2​.1​/reynolds​.html.

Two. Setting Goals 1 Jacques Depelchin, Silences in African History: Between the Syndromes of Discovery and Abolition (Dar es Salaam: Mbuki Na Nyoto, 2005), 2. 2 Steven Feierman, “African Histories and the Dissolution of World History,” in Robert H. Bates, V. Y. Mudimbe, and Jean O’Barr, eds., Africa and the Disciplines: The Contributions of Research in Africa to the Social Sciences and Humanities (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 167–­212, 167–­168. 3 Kathleen R. Smythe, “Why We Need African History,” in Brandon D. Lundy and Solomon Negash, eds., Teaching Africa: A Guide for the 21st-­Century Classroom (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013), 38–­52, 38. 4 Asa G. Hilliard III, “Why We Must Pluralize the Curriculum,” Educational Leadership 49 (4) (1991): 12–­16. 5 J. E. Casely Hayford, Gold Coast Native Institutions: With Thoughts upon a Healthy Imperial Policy for the Gold Coast and Ashanti (London: Sweet and Maxwell, 1903). 6 One pretty good guide for writing measurable student learning outcomes is Sandi Osters and F. Simone Tiu, “Writing Measurable Learning Outcomes,” unpublished paper from the third annual Texas a&m Assessment Conference, available online at http://​www​.gavilan​.edu​/research​/spd​/Writing​-­­Measurable​ -­­Learning​-O ­­ utcomes​.pdf. 7 bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom (New York: Routledge, 1994). 8 I particularly recommend Sam Wineburg, Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts: Charting the Future of Teaching the Past (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2001). But also consider Bain’s critical essay, “Into the Breach: Using Research and Theory to Shape History Instruction,” Journal of Education 189 (2009): 159–­167. 9 George J. Sefa Dei, Teaching Africa: Towards a Transgressive Pedagogy (New York: Springer, 2010). 10 Milton M. Adams and Mejomo Coulibaly, “African Traditional Pedagogy in a Modern Perspective,” Prospects 15 (1985): 273–­280. 11 Gloria Ladson-­Billings, “But That’s Just Good Teaching! The Case for Culturally Relevant Pedagogy,” Theory into Practice 31(3) (1994): 160–­166; Glo152

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12 13 14

15 16

ria Ladson-­Billings, “Towards a Theory of Culturally Relevant Pedagogy,” American Educational Research Journal 32 (1995): 465–­491. See, for example, Gloria Ladson-­Billings, “Culturally Relevant Pedagogy 2.0: a.k.a. the Remix,” Harvard Educational Review (2014): 74–­135. Thomas O’Toole, “Using the Personalized System of Instruction to Teach African History,” African Studies Review 20 (1977): 101–­112. Chris Lowe with Tunde Brimah, Pearl-­Alice Marsh, William Minter, and Monde Muyangwa, “Talking about ‘Tribe’: Moving from Stereotypes to Analysis,” background paper, Africa Policy Information Center, November 1997, http://​africanactivist​.msu​.edu​/document​_metadata​.php​?objectid​=​32-130153D; “The Trouble with Tribe,” Tolerance​.org, http://​www​.tolerance​.org​ /magazine​/number​-1­­ 9-spring-­2001/feature/trouble-­tribe. Scott MacEachern, “Genes, Tribes, and African History,” Current Anthropology 41 (2000): 357–­384. Lendol Calder, “The Stories We Tell,” oah Magazine of History 27 (2013): 5–­8.

Three. Locating Africa 1 “General Report” of the “Regional Conference on ‘Renovating History Teaching in Africa’: The Pedagogical Use of the General History of Africa,” June 10–­16, 2010, Tripoli, Libya, http://​www​.unesco​.org​/new​/fileadmin​ /MULTIMEDIA​/HQ​/CLT​/CLT​/pdf​/General​_History​_of​_Africa​/GHA​ _GENERAL​%20REPORT​%20TRIPOLI​%202010​.pdf. 2 See Robert I. Rotberg, “The Teaching of African History,” American Historical Review 69 (1963): 47–­63. 3 Peter Duignan and Lewis Gann, eds., Africa and the World (San Francisco: Chandler, 1972). An updated version is Roland Oliver, The African Experience (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1991). 4 Kevin Shillington, History of Africa, 2nd ed. (New York: Macmillan, 2005). The third edition slightly updates this format and is due to come out as this book goes to press. It will include new sections on colonial Congo and apartheid South Africa, but otherwise it appears to largely retain its original format and scope. 5 http://​www​.bu​.edu​/africa​/outreach​/resources​/curriculum​/curriculum​-­­g uide/. 6 John Iliffe, Africans: The History of a Continent, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 1. 7 See Esperanza Brizuela-­Garcia and Trevor Getz, “Going Global I: A Reconnaissance into the Role of Africanists in World History,” World History Bulletin 22 (2006): 4–­9. 153

n ot es to c h a p t er t h r e e 8 Erik T. Gilbert, Dhows and the Colonial Economy of Zanzibar, 1860–­1970 (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2004). Thomas Spear and Derek Nurse, The Swahili: Reconstructing the History and Language of an African Society, 800–­ 1500 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985). 9 Janet L. Abu-­Lughod, Before European Hegemony: The World System a.d. 125–­ 1350 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991). There are many versions of Ibn Battuta’s journal, including free online translations such as the one on Fordham University’s website: http://​legacy​.fordham​.edu​/halsall​/source​/1354-ibnbat tuta.asp. 10 Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double-­Consciousness (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993); John Thornton, Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400–­1800, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). 11 Erik T. Gilbert and Jonathan T. Reynolds, Africa in World History: From Prehistory to the Present, 3rd ed. (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson, 2011). 12 For another possible model, look also at Patrick Manning, “African and World Historiography,” Journal of African History 54 (2013): 319–­330. 13 Mahmood Mamdani, Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Colonialism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997). 14 “Unit 2: Colonialism and Segregation: The Origins of Apartheid,” South Africa: Overcoming Apartheid, Building Democracy, http://​overcomingapart heid​.msu​.edu​/unit​.php​?id​=​65-24E-­2. 15 Cheikh Anta Diop, The African Origins of Civilization (Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 1974); Wyatt MacGaffey, “Who Owns Ancient Egypt?,” Journal of African History 32 (1991): 515–­519; Wyatt MacGaffey, “Concepts of Race in the Historiography of Northeast Africa,” Journal of African History 7 (1966): 1–­ 17; Donald B. Redford, From Slave to Pharaoh: The Black Experience of Ancient Egypt (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006). 16 Robert O. Collins and James M. Burns, A History of Sub-­Saharan Africa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). 17 Michael Brett, Approaching African History (Rochester, NY: James Curry, 2013). 18 Tim Carmichael, “When Satiety and Avarice Marry, Hunger Is Born: African Voices of the Colonial Era, ca. 1896–­1945,” in Trevor R. Getz, ed., African Voices of the Global Past: 1500 to the Present (Boulder, CO: Westview, 2014), 69–­106.

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Four. When Was Africa? 1 Steven Feierman, “Colonizers, Scholars, and the Creation of Invisible Histories,” in Victoria E. Bonnell and Lynn Hunt, eds., Beyond the Cultural Turn: New Directions in the Study of Society and Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 182–­216. 2 Robert I. Rotberg, “The Teaching of African History,” American Historical Review 69 (1963): 47–­63. 3 John Iliffe, Africans: The History of a Continent, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). 4 A. Adu Boahen, African Perspectives on Colonialism (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987). 5 Frederick Cooper, Africa since 1940: The Past of the Present (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). 6 Joseph Ki-­Zerbo, “General Introduction,” in Joseph Ki-­Zerbo, ed., unesco General History of Africa, Volume 1: Methodology and African Prehistory (London: Heinemann, 1981), 18–­19. 7 Stephen Ellis, “Writing Histories of Contemporary Africa,” Journal of African History 43(2002): 10. 8 Walter Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (London: Bogle-­ L’Ouverture, 1972). 9 This is the driving argument of my book Cosmopolitan Africa: 1700–­1850 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), which I sometimes assign to students. 10 Personal correspondence with Liz McMahon. 11 Jonathan T. Reynolds, Sovereignty and Struggle: Africa and Africans in the Era of the Cold War, 1945–­1994 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014).

Five. Who Are Africans? 1 Stuart Hall, “Who Needs ‘Identity’?,” in Paul du Gay, Jessica Evans, and Peter Predman, eds., Identity: A Reader (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2000), 15–­30. 2 These various uses of the term are much more expertly discussed by Rogers Brubaker and Frederick Cooper in their article “Beyond ‘Identity,’ ” Theory and Society 29 (2000): 1–­47. 3 Jan Vansina, How Societies Are Born: Governance in West Central Africa before 1600 (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2004). 4 C. L. Innes, The Cambridge Introduction to Postcolonial Literatures in English (New Delhi: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 208. 5 V. Y. Mudimbe, The Invention of Africa: Gnosis, Philosophy, and the Order of Knowledge (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988). 155

n ot es to c h a p t er f i v e 6 Jemima Pierre, The Predicament of Blackness: Postcolonial Ghana and the Politics of Race (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), xii–­xiii, emphasis in the original. 7 Carina Ray, “We Have a History,” New African ( January 2008): 24–­25; Carina Ray, “Lest We Forget: Racial Politics of Writing African History,” New African (May 2008): 24–­25. 8 Choiki el Hamel, Black Morocco: A History of Slavery, Race, and Islam (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014); Jonathan Glassman, War of Words, War of Stones: Racial Thought and Violence in Colonial Zanzibar (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011). 9 Carina Ray, Crossing the Color Line: Race, Sex, and the Contested Politics of Colonial Ghana (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2015). 10 Hilary Jones, The Métis of Senegal: Urban Life and Politics in French West Africa (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013). 11 Reiland Rabaka, The Negritude Movement: W. E. B. Du Bois, Leon Damas, Aimé Césaire, Frantz Fanon, and the Evolution of an Insurgent Idea (Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2016). 12 Helen M. Hintjens, “Explaining the 1994 Genocide in Rwanda,” Journal of Modern African Studies 3 (1999): 241–­286; Catherine André and Jean-­Philippe Platteau, “Land Relations under Unbearable Stress: Rwanda Caught in the Malthusian Trap,” Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization 34 (1997): 1–­47; Gérard Prunier, The Rwandan Crisis: History of a Genocide (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995). 13 Iris Berger, “African Women’s History: Themes and Perspectives,” Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History 4 (2003); Nancy Rose Hunt, “Placing African Women’s History and Locating Gender,” Social History 14 (1989): 359–­ 379. 14 Nakanyike Musisi, “Gender and Sexuality in African History: A Personal Reflection,” Journal of African History 55 (2014): 303–­315. 15 Oyeronke Oyewumi, The Invention of Women: Making an African Sense of Western Gender Discourses (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997); Ifi Amadiume, Male Daughters, Female Husbands: Gender and Sex in an African Society (London: Zed, 1987). 16 William W. Gqoba, “The Cause of the Cattle-­Killing at the Nongqawuse Period,” in A. C. Jordan, ed., Towards an African Literature: The Emergence of Literary Form in Xhosa (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973); excerpt from Jeff Pieres, The Dead Will Arise: Nongqawuse and the Great Xhosa Cattle-­ Killing Movement of 1856–­1857 ( Johannesburg: Raven, 1989). 17 Zakes Mda, Heart of Redness (New York: Picador, 2003). 156

n ot es to c h a p t er s i x 18 Helen Bradford, “Women, Gender and Colonialism: Rethinking the History of the British Cape Colony and Its Frontier Zones, c. 1806–­1870,” Journal of African History 37 (1996): 351–­370. 19 Alicia C. Decker and Andrea L. Arrington, Africanizing Democracies: 1980–­Present (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015). 20 Christine Saidi, Rhonda Gonzales, and Cymone Fourshey, Bantu Africa (New York: Oxford University Press, forthcoming). 21 Kathleen Sheldon, African Women: Early History to the 21st Century (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2017).

Six. Making Hard Choices 1 Grant J. Wiggins and Jay McTighe, Understanding by Design, 2nd expanded ed. (New York: Pearson, 2005). 2 Donald R. Wright, The World and a Very Small Place in Africa: A History of Globalization in Niumi, the Gambia (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 2017). 3 Vincent Khapoya, The African Experience, 4th ed. (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson, 2013). 4 Christopher Ehret, The Civilizations of Africa: A History to 1800, 2nd ed. (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2016). 5 Elizabeth Isichei, A History of African Societies to 1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). 6 Toyin Falola and Christian Jennings, Sources and Methods in African History: Spoken, Written, Unearthed (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2003); John Edward Philips, Writing African History (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2005); Esperanza Brizuela-­Garcia and Trevor R. Getz, African Histories: New Sources and New Techniques for Studying African Pasts (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2011). 7 Constanze Weise, “Representations of Africa in the Classroom,” African Arts 46 (2013): 6. 8 Robert O. Collins, African History in Documents, 3 vols. (Princeton, NJ: Markus Wiener, 1990); Robert O. Collins, Documents from the African Past (Princeton, NJ: Markus Wiener, 2001). 9 J. F. P. Hopkins and Nehemia Levtzion, Corpus of Early Arabic Sources for West African History (Princeton, NJ: Markus Wiener, 2000). 10 Roderick J. McIntosh, “Clustered Cities of the Middle Niger: Alternative Routes to Authority in Prehistory,” in David M. Anderson and Richard Rathbone, eds., Africa’s Urban Past (Oxford: James Currey, 2005), 19–­35; Susan Keech McIntosh, “Modeling Political Organization in Large-­Scale Settlement Clusters: A Case Study from the Inland Niger Delta,” in Susan Keech McIn157

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11 12 13

14

tosh, ed., Beyond Chiefdoms: Pathways to Complexity in Africa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 66–­79. John Thornton, “Cannibals, Witches, and Slave Traders in the Atlantic World,” William and Mary Quarterly 60 (2003): 273–­294. Kwasi Konadu, Transatlantic Africa: 1440–­1888 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014). Galawdewos, The Life and Struggles of Our Mother Walatta Petros: A Seventeenth-­Century African Biography of an Ethiopian Woman, trans. and ed. Wendy Laura Belcher and Michael Kleiner (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015). See “Lesson Plan for Unit on Sexualities and Religious Identity in Early Modern Africa,” http://​www​.wendybelcher​.com​/african​-­­literature​/walatta​ -­­petros/.

Seven. Ethical Thinking 1 Published as Amina Mama, “Is It Ethical to Study Africa? Preliminary Thoughts on Scholarship and Freedom,” African Studies Review 50 (2007): 1–­26. 2 Mama, “Is It Ethical to Study Africa?,” 4. 3 Ibrahim Abdullah, “Preface,” in Jacques Depelchin, Silences in African History: Between the Syndromes of Discovery and Abolition (Dar es Salaam: Mkuki na Nyota, 2005), xi. 4 Iweala Uzodinma, “Stop Trying to ‘Save’ Africa,” Washington Post, July 15, 2007. 5 Depelchin, Silences, 6. 6 Gary Marquardt, “Answering the ‘So What’ Question: Making African History Relevant in the Provincial College Classroom,” in Brandon D. Lundy and Solomon Negash, eds., Teaching Africa: A Guide for the 21st-­Century Classroom (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013), 53–­60. 7 Martin Klein, “Studying the History of Those Who Would Rather Forget: Oral History and the Experience of Slavery,” History in Africa 16 (1989): 207–­ 219. 8 Curtis A. Keim, “Teaching the African Slave Trade with Documents,” in Misty L. Bastian and Jane L. Parpart, eds., Great Ideas for Teaching about Africa (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1999), 74. 9 John Thornton, Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400–­ 1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Anne Bailey, African Voices of the Atlantic Slave Trade: Beyond the Silence and the Shame (Boston: Beacon, 2006). 10 Alice Bellagamba, Sandra E. Greene, and Martin A. Klein, eds., African 158

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11 12

13

14 15 16

17

Voices on Slavery and the Slave Trade (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). See, for example, Ralph Austen, “The Slave Trade as History and Memory: Confrontations of Slaving Voyages Documents and Communal Traditions,” William and Mary Quarterly ( January 2001): 229–­242. Robin Horton, “African Traditional Thought and Western Science, Part I,” Africa 37 (1967): 50–­71; Steven Feierman, “Struggles for Control: The Social Roots of Health and Healing in Modern Africa,” African Studies Review 28 (1985): 73–­147; Abena Dove Osee-­Osare, Bitter Roots: The Search for Healing Plants in Africa (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014). John C. Caldwell, Pat Caldwell, and Pat Quiggin, “The Social Context of aids in Sub-­Saharan Africa,” Population and Development Review 15, no. 2 ( June 1989): 187; J. Wang, “aids Denialism and ‘The Humanisation of the African,’ ” Race and Class 49 (2008): 1–­18. Dennis Laumann, Colonial Africa: 1884–­1994 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014). Depelchin, Silences, 25–­52. Ernest Wamba-­dia-­Wamba, “Experience of Democracy in Africa: Reflections on the Practice of Communalist Palaver as a Method of Resolving Contradictions among the People,” Philosophy and Social Action 11 ( July–­September 1985): 3, 5–­23. Todd Cleveland, “Africa: Which Way Forward? An Interdisciplinary Approach,” in Lundy and Negash, Teaching Africa, 33–­34.

Eight. Teaching Methodology 1 Toyin Falola and Christian Jennings, Sources and Methods in African History: Spoken, Written, Unearthed (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2003). 2 John Edward Philips, Writing African History (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2005). 3 Trevor R. Getz and Esperanza Brizuela-­Garcia, African Histories: New Sources and New Techniques for Studying African Pasts (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2011). 4 Christopher Ehret, “Writing African History from Linguistic Evidence,” in Philips, Writing African History, 86–­111; Gerrit J. Dimmendaal, Historical Linguistics and the Comparative Study of African Languages (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2011). 5 Kathryn M. de Luna, “Affect and Society in Precolonial Africa,” International Journal of African Historical Studies 46 (2013): 123–­150. 159

n ot es to c h a p t er e i g h t 6 Joseph C. Miller, “Presidential Address: History and Africa/Africa and History,” American Historical Review 104 (1999): 1–­32; available in a slightly different form at http://​www​.ecu​.edu​/african​/sersas​/jmahapa​.htm. 7 Jan Vansina, Oral Tradition as History (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985). 8 David Henige, “Oral Tradition as a Means of Reconstructing the Past,” in Philips, Writing African History, 169–­190. 9 Joseph C. Miller, The African Past Speaks: Essays on Oral Tradition and History (Folkstone, UK: William Dawson and Sons, 1980); Luise White, Stephan F. Miescher, and David William Cohen, African Words, African Voices: Critical Practices in Oral History (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001). 10 Emily Lynn Osborn, Our New Husbands Are Here: Household, Gender, and Politics in a West African State from the Slave Trade to Colonial Rule (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2011). 11 Carolyn Hamilton, Terrific Majesty: The Powers of Shaka Zulu and the Limits of Historical Invention (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998). 12 Bogumil Jewsiewicki, “Popular Painting in Contemporary Katanga: Painters, Audiences, Buyers and Sociopolitical Contexts,” in Bogumil Jewsiewicki, ed., A Congo Chronicle: Patrice Lumumba in Urban Art (New York: Museum for African Art, 1999), 15–­16; Johannes Fabian, Remembering the Present: Painting and Popular History in Zaire (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996). 13 Jean Ngoya Kidula, “Stereotypes, Myths, and Realities Regarding African Music in the African and American Academy,” in Brandon D. Lundy and Solomon Negash, eds., Teaching Africa: A Guide for the 21st-­Century Classroom (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013), 140–­155. See also Adeline Masquelier, “The Medium Is the Message: Teaching African through Music,” in Bastian and Parpart, Great Ideas for Teaching about Africa. 14 Kidula, “Stereotypes, Myths, and Realities,” 144. 15 Wolfgang Bender, Sweet Mother: Modern African Music (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991). 16 Jonathan Reynolds, Sovereignty and Struggle: Africa and Africans in the Era of the Cold War, 1945–­1994 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014). 17 A useful guide text for many African novels is Margaret Jean Hay, ed., African Novels in the Classroom (Boulder, CO: Lynne Reinner, 2000), although it is somewhat oriented to a literature course rather than the history classroom. 18 James Currey, Africa Writes Back: The African Writers Series and the Launch of African Literature (Oxford: James Currey, 2008). 19 Kwaku Larbi Korang, “Francophone/Anglophone Dialogue: A Roundtable on the Aesthetics and Politics of Foundational Texts in an Era of Diaspora and 160

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20 21 22

23 24 25

Transnationalism,” African Studies Association annual meeting, San Francisco, 2010. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Half of a Yellow Sun (New York: Anchor, 2006); Catherine Kroll, “Inversion Rituals: The African Novel in the Global North,” in Lundy and Negash, Teaching Africa, 115–­128. See Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, “The Danger of a Single Story,” ted, July 2009, https://​www​.ted​.com​/talks​/chimamanda​_adichie​_the​_danger​_of​_a​ _single​_story​?language​=​en. Josef Gugler, African Film: Re-­imagining a Continent (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004); Melissa Thackway, Africa Shoots Back: Alternative Perspectives in Sub-­Saharan African Film (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004). Ousmane Sembène, God’s Bits of Wood (1960; Oxford: Heinemann, 1970). Frederick Cooper, “ ‘Our Strike’: Equality, Anticolonial Politics and the 1947–­ 1948 Railway Strike in French West Africa,” Journal of African History 37 (1996): 81–­118. Jacques Depelchin, Silences in African History: Between the Syndromes of Discovery and Abolition (Dar es Salaam: Mkuki na Nyota, 2005), 155.

Nine. The Other Digital Divide 1 Terry Barringer and Marion Wallace, eds., African Studies in the Digital Age: DisConnects? (Leiden: Brill, 2014). 2 Some articles that take different approaches to the digital divide include Annie Chéneau-­Loguay, “From Networks to Use Patterns: The Digital Divide as Seen from Africa,” GeoJournal 68 (2007): 55–­70; Christian Fuchs and Eva Horak, “Africa and the Digital Divide,” Telematics and Informatics 25 (2008): 99–­116; Meseret D. Gebremichael and Jason W. Jackson, “Bridging the Gap in Sub-­Saharan Africa: A Holistic Look at Information Poverty and the Region’s Digital Divide,” Government Information Quarterly 23 (2006): 267–­280. 3 https://​library​.stanford​.edu​/africa​-­­south​-­­sahara. 4 https://​www​.africa​.upenn​.edu​/resources; http://​www​.ascleiden​.nl/; http://​ library​.columbia​.edu​/locations​/global​/virtual​-­­libraries​/african​_studies​.html; http://​repository​.uwc​.ac​.za​/xmlui​/handle​/10566​/29; http://​www​.nai​.uu​.se​ /research/. 5 “ifla/unesco Manifesto for Digital Libraries,” 2007 (revised 2010), http://​ www​.ifla​.org​/files​/assets​/digital​-­­libraries​/documents​/ifla​-­­unesco​-­­digital​ -­­libraries​-m ­­ anifesto​.pdf. 6 Premesh Lalu, “The Virtual Stampede for Africa: Digitisation, Postcolonial-

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n ot es to c h a p t er n i n e ity and Archives of the Liberation Struggles in Southern Africa,” Innovation 34 (2007): 28–­44. 7 http://​allafrica​.com/. 8 http://​www​.loc​.gov​/exhibits​/mali/; https://​www​.aluka​.org​/heritage​/collection​ /TIMMAN; http://​www​.gov​.za​/sites​/www​.gov​.za​/files​/po​_timbuktu​_0​.pdf. 9 http://​aodl​.org/. 10 http://​www​.slaveryimages​.org/. 11 http://​www​.washingtonpost​.com​/wp​-­­srv​/special​/world​/africa/. 12 http://​www​.lib​.utexas​.edu​/maps​/historical​/history​_africa​.html. 13 https://​www​.youtube​.com​/watch​?v​=​IuyfK7NLosY. 14 http://​www​.h​-­­net​.org​/​~africa/; https://​networks​.h​-­­net​.org​/h​-­­africa 15 https://​worldmap​.harvard​.edu​/africamap/. 16 http://​africasacountry​.com/. 17 http://​afripod​.aodl​.org/. 18 http://​afripod​.aodl​.org​/2012​/09​/afripod​-­­65/ (September 6, 2012). 19 http://​history​.msu​.edu​/hst830​/schedule​/nation​-­­building​-­­histories​/teaching​ -­­south​-a­­ frican​-h ­­ istory/. 20 http://​overcomingapartheid​.msu​.edu/. 21 http://​www​.slavevoyages​.org/. 22 http://​en​.unesco​.org​/womeninafrica/. 23 http://​liberianhistory​.org. Other organizations that support the site are the Center for National Documents and Records Agency in Liberia; Indiana University Liberian Collections; Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media at George Mason University; and the University of Wisconsin, Madison, with support from the National Science Foundation.

Ten. Bringing It All Together 1 “Is Aid Killing Africa? Dambisa Moyo Talks about Dead Aid on abc,” posted May 4, 2009, YouTube, https://​www​.youtube​.com​/watch​?v​=​HIPvlQOCfAQ; “Aid Is Political, Markets Are Neutral—President Kagame Capital Markets Conference,” posted February 12, 2015, YouTube, https://​www​.youtube​.com​ /watch​?v​=​Qh26sXNj7eY. 2 Binyavanga Wainaina, “How to Write about Africa,” Granta 92 (2006), http://​granta​.com​/how​-­­to-write-­about-­africa/; Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, “The Danger of a Single Story,” ted, July 2009, https://​www​.ted​.com​/talks​ /chimamanda​_adichie​_the​_danger​_of​_a​_single​_story​?language​=​en. 3 Jennifer E. Coffman, “Introducing ‘Africa,’ ” in Brandon D. Lundy and Solo­ mon Negash, eds., Teaching Africa: A Guide for the 21st-­Century Classroom (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013), 21–­26. 162

n ot es to c h a p t er t e n 4 S. Freeman, S. L. Eddy, M. McDonough, M. K. Smith, N. Okorafor, H. Jordt, and M. P. Wenderoth, “Active Learning Increases Student Performance in Science, Engineering, and Mathematics,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 111 (2014): 8410–­8415. 5 Donald A. Bligh, What’s the Use of Lectures? (San Francisco: Jossey-­Bass), 2000. 6 Catherine Coquery-­Vidrovitch, “Electricity Networks in Africa: A Comparative Study, or How to Write Social History from Economic Sources,” in Toyin Falola and Christian Jennings, eds., Sources and Methods in African History: Spoken, Written, Unearthed (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2003), 346–­360. 7 D. T. Niane, Sundiata: An Epic of Old Mali, rev. ed. (New York: Pearson, 2006). 8 For more on this, see Carohn Cornell and Leslie Witz, “ ‘It Is My Right to Participate in the Subject’: Contesting Histories in the First Year Lecture Room,” Social Dynamics 20 (1994): 49–­74. 9 Benjamin C. Wray, “Using the World Wide Web to Teach about African Art,” in Misty L. Bastian and Jane L. Parpart, eds., Great Ideas for Teaching about Africa (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1999), 153–­167. 10 Cynthia J. Brame, “Flipping the Classroom,” Vanderbilt University, http://​cft​ .vanderbilt​.edu​/guides​-s­­ ub​-p­­ ages​/flipping​-t­­ he​-c­­ lassroom/.

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4^ Selected Bibliography 64

Adams, Milton M., and Mejomo Coulibaly. “African Traditional Pedagogy in a Modern Perspective.” Prospects 15 (1985): 275–­280. Alden, Patricia, David Lloyd, and Ahmed Samatar, eds. African Studies and the Undergraduate Curriculum. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1994. Alpers, Edward A. “Reflections on the Studying and Teaching about Africa in America.” Issue: A Journal of Opinion 23 (1995): 9–­10. Barringer, Terry, and Marion Wallace, eds. African Studies in the Digital Age: DisConnects? Leiden: Brill, 2014. Bastian, Misty, and Jane Parpart, eds. Great Ideas for Teaching about Africa. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1999. Bates, Robert H., V. Y. Mudimbe, and Jean O’Barr, eds. Africa and the Disciplines: The Contributions of Research in Africa to the Social Sciences and Humanities. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993. Boahen, A. Adu. African Perspectives on Colonialism. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987. Brizuela-­Garcia, Esperanza, and Trevor R. Getz. African Histories: New Sources and New Techniques for Studying African Pasts. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2011. Depelchin, Jacques. Silences in African History: Between the Syndromes of Discovery and Abolition. Dar es Salaam: Mkuki na Nyota, 2005. Falola, Toyin, and Christian Jennings, eds. Sources and Methods in African History: Spoken, Written, Unearthed. Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2003. Hay, Margaret Jean, ed. African Novels in the Classroom. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2000. Hilliard, Asa G., III. “Why We Must Pluralize the Curriculum.” Educational Leadership 49 (4) (1991): 12–­14.

S el ec t ed B i b l i o gr a p h y hooks, bell. Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom. New York: Routledge, 1994. Keim, Curtis. Mistaking Africa: Curiosities and Inventions of the American Mind. 2nd ed. Philadelphia: Westview, 2009. Ki-­Zerbo, Joseph, ed. unesco General History of Africa, Volume 1: Methodology and African Prehistory. London: Heinemann, 1981. Ladson-­Billings, Gloria. “Towards a Theory of Culturally Relevant Pedagogy.” American Educational Research Journal 32 (1995): 465–­491. Lundy, Brandon D., and Solomon Negash, eds. Teaching Africa: A Guide for the 21st-­Century Classroom. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013. Mama, Amina. “Is It Ethical to Study Africa? Preliminary Thoughts on Scholarship and Freedom.” African Studies Review 50 (2007): 1–­26. O’Toole, Thomas. “Using the Personalized System of Instruction to Teach African History.” African Studies Review 20 (1977): 101–­112. Philips, John Edward. Writing African History. Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2005. Rotberg, Robert I. “The Teaching of African History.” American Historical Review 69 (1963): 47–­63. Sefa Dei, George J. Teaching Africa: Towards a Transgressive Pedagogy. New York: Springer, 2010. Spaulding, Jay, and Lidwien Kapteijns. “The Periodization of Precolonial African History.” Unpublished paper, Boston University African Studies Center, Working Paper 125, 1987.

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4^ Index 64

Achebe, Chinua, 81; Things Fall Apart, 16, 18 Achebe, Nwando, 133 active learning, 144, 147 Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi, 121, 141 Adwa, Battle of, 62, 131 Africa, 24–­26, 81; demography, 70–­71; ethics of studying, 102–­6; geography, 50–­51, 53; preconceptions and misrepresentations of, 14–­18, 21–­23, 32–­43 Africa in World History: From Prehistory to the Present, 58–­59 Africa Is a Country, 132 Africa Map, 132 Africana studies, 16 African diaspora, 59, 63–­64 African Histories: New Sources and New Techniques for Studying African Pasts, 96, 97, 115 African history, 28–­29; climate and environment, 55–­56; and content, 43; and educated citizens, 33–­34; ethics of, 107–­12; in general education, 30–­ 33; generations of scholars, 29, 105, 117; identity in, 79–­90; methodology of, 113–­24; narrative in, 43; pedagogy in, 38–­40; periodization, 67–­68; “tour

model,” 50–­53; and world history, 57–­60 African History in Documents, 98 Africans: The History of a Continent, 56 African Studies Association, 104 Africa Past and Present, 132–­33 Africa since 1940, 73 Africa South of the Sahara, 129 Afrocentricity, 21, 63 aids, 108, 110 Ajayi, J. F. Ade, 50, 117 Aksum, 51, 62 Amadiume, Ifi, 87 apartheid, 16, 57, 61 “Approaches to the African Past” course, 14–­15 archaeology, 96 Ardipithecus, 55 art, 3, 119 assessment, 147–­49 Atlantic slave trade system, 75; databases and visual records of, 130, 134; ethics in the study of, 107–­8; and identity formation, 85; linguistic sources, 98; oral sources, 97 Australopithecus, 55 authenticity, 73

index Bailey, Anne, 107 BaKongo, 98–­99, 110 BaLuba, 2–­4 Bantu, 60–­61, 71, 89–­90; linguistic analysis, 116 Bantu Africa, 89–­90 Battle of Algiers, The, 21 Biafran War, 86 Biobaku, Saburi, 117 Boahen, A. Adu, 28, 50, 73, 105 Boko Haram, 76 Bradford, Helen, 88–­89

Dei, George Sefa, 36–­37 de Luna, Kathryn, 116 Democratic Republic of Congo, 2 Depelchin, Jacques, 109, 123 diasporic Africa, 59, 63–­64 Die Antwoord, 16 digital divide, 127–­28 digital tools, 125–­35 Dike, K. O., 117 Diop, Cheikh Anta, 28, 50, 61 ecological banding, 55 Egypt, 15, 61–­62, 94 Ehret, Chris, 95–­96, 116 Equiano, Olaudah, 107 Ethiopia, 62, 63, 130 ethnicity, 84–­86

Calder, Lendol, 44 Casablanca, 21 Casely-­Hayford, J.  E., 31 Césaire, Aimé, 84 China, 130 Christianity, 51 Civilizations of Africa: A History to 1800, The, 95–­96 Clevelend, Todd, 110–­11 codesria, 126 Coffman, Jean, 141–­42 Collins, Robert O., 98 colonialism, 52, 53, 63, 71, 75–­76, 135; violence in, 108–­9 Coming to America, 21 Cooper, Frederick, 73 Coquery-­Vidrovitch, Catherine, 144 course design, 9–­11, 13–­14 course outcomes. See student learning outcomes coverage, 92–­93

Falola, Toyin, 115 Fanon, Frantz, 130 Feierman, Steve, 68 film, 121 Fortunes of Africa, The, 16 Fourshey, Cymone, 89, 144 gender, 86–­89, 99, 123, 133, 144–­45 “Gender in African History” course, 36 Ghana, 16, 30, 83, 94 God’s Bits of Wood, 122–­23 Gonzales, Rhonda, 89 Gqoba, William, 88–­89 Great Rift Valley, 51 Great Zimbabwe, 53 Hall, Stuart, 79 Hamilton, Carolyn, 118 Henige, David, 117 Hiliard, Asa, 30–­31 historical linguistics, 96, 116

“Danger of a Single Story, The,” 121 Dead Will Arise, The, 88–­89 Decker, Corrie, 145–­46 decolonization, 72, 73–­74, 76 168

index “History and Memory in Africa” course, 36 hiv, 108, 110 H-­Net, 131 Homo sapiens, 55 hooks, bell, 36 Hotel Rwanda, 21 “How Big Is Africa?,” 53 “How to Write about Africa,” 22–­24, 141 human evolution, 54 Hunt, Nancy Rose, 86

Liberian Journey: History, Memory, and the Making of a Nation, A, 135 Life and Struggles of Our Mother Walatta Petros, The, 99 Limb, Peter, 126, 132 Lindsay, Lisa, 148 linguistic sources, 96, 116 Lion King, The, 21 literature, 120–­23 Luba. See BaLuba Lukasa, 2–­4, 47–­48, 101–­2, 149

identity, 79–­82 Iliffe, John, 56 immigration, 110 industrial revolution, 75, 94 interdisciplinarity, 32 Isichei, Elizabeth, 95 “Is It Ethical to Study Africa,” 104–­5, 109 Islam, 51, 71, 72

Maathai, Wangari, 18 Madagascar, 50, 53, 63 Mali, 16 Mama, Amina, 104–­5, 109–­10 Mamdani, Mahmood, 61, 132 Mande Core Rules, 98 Mandela, Nelson, 16, 18 Marley, Damien, 16 matrix, 130 Matulu, Tshibumba Kanda, 119 Matusevich, Maxim, 146 Mbudye, 2–­4, 101–­2 McIntosh, Roderick J., 98 McIntosh, Susan Keech, 98 McMahon, Elisabeth, 75, 145 Mda, Zakes, 88 memory, 2–­3, 107, 135 Meroe, 51, 52, 53, 57 methodology, 95, 113–­24 Métissage, 83 Miller, Joseph, 117–­18 Mistaking Africa, 24, 41–­42 “Modern Africa” course, 24, 74–­77 modernity, 76 Morocco, 83 Moyo, Dambisa, 141 Mudimbe, V. Y., 81

Kagame, Paul, 23, 141 Keim, Curtis, 24, 41–­42, 107 Khapoya, Vincent, 94 Kidula, Jean Ngoya, 119–­20 King Leopold’s Ghost, 16 kinship, 84 Ki-­Zerbo, Joseph, 50, 73, 105 Konadu, Kwasi, 34–­35, 99, 144–­45 Kongo. See BaKongo Kony 2012, 16, 76, 130 Korang, Kwaku Larbi, 120 Kush, 51 Ladson-­Billings, Gloria, 38 Lalu, Premesh, 88, 129 Laumann, Dennis, 109 lecturing, 143–­44 Liberia, 135

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index Reynolds, Jonathan, 23–­25, 76, 120 Rodney, Walter, 75 Rwanda, 85; national digital strategy of, 126–­27; 1994 genocide in, 86, 108–­9

museums, 146 music, 118, 119–­20 Musisi, Nakanyike, 86, 87 negritude, 63, 84 Nguni, 60–­61 Nigeria, 29, 86, 87, 133 Niger River, 55, 94; Inland Niger River Delta, 98 Nile River, 53 Nongqawuse, 88–­89 North Africa, 61–­62, 72 Obenga, Theophile, 61 Ogot, Bethwell Allan, 50 oral tradition, 96; and oral history, 117–­18 Osborn, Emily, 118 Overcoming Apartheid, 61, 134 Oyewumi, Oyeronke, 87 palaver, 110 Pan-­African movement, 60, 63 Parker, John, 137 pedagogy, 35–­40, 137–­49; African “traditional,” 37–­38; culturally relevant, 38; ethics within, 102–­11; transgressive, 36–­37 periodization, 67–­72, 74–­77 Pierre, Jemima, 82 postcolonial (concept and periodization), 76, 104 precolonial (concept and periodization), 70, 71; in course design, 93–­97 primary sources. See sources race, 82–­83 Ray, Carina, 83 relevance, 74

Saidi, Christine, 89, 116, 131, 141 Sayeh, Philomena Bloh, 135 Sembène, Ousmane, 121, 122–­23 Senegal, 83, 94, 122–­23 Senghor, Leopold, 84 Shaka kaSenzangakhona, 74, 118 Shillington, Kevin, 52 “So Many Africas, So Little Time,” 23–­25 sources, 29, 32, 95, 96, 107–­8, 113–­24 Sources and Methods in African History, 96, 115 South Africa, 60–­61, 145 Soweto, 145 student learning outcomes, 13–­14, 65, 77–­78, 89–­90, 111–­12, 124, 139–­41; designing, 34–­40; goals common to African history courses, 13 students, 14–­22; challenging preconceptions of Africa, 19–­25, 40–­42; identity introduced to, 8–­82; instructors’ views on deficiency of, 17–­19; preconceptions and knowledge, 14, 16–­19, 20–­ 22; “saving” Africa, 16, 19, 105–­6; and social justice, 16, 111–­12 Sundiata, 144–­45 Swahili, 51 syllabus, 139–­41 Teaching to Transgress, 36 Things Fall Apart, 16, 18 Thornton, John, 98, 107 tribe, 20, 24, 40–­43

170

index Voyages: The Transatlantic Slave Trade Database, 134

Uganda, 130 Ugbabe, Ahebi, 133 uncoverage, 92–­93, 97–­99; balanced approach to, 95–­97; deep case studies as an approach, 93–­94 unesco General History of Africa, 49–­ 50, 73 University of Ghana, Legon, 29 University of Ibadan, 29 University of KwaZulu-­Natal, 44 University of the Western Cape, 43–­44, 74, 88, 145

Wainaina, Binyavanga, 22–­23, 141 Walatta Petros, 99 Wamba-­dia-­Wamba, Ernest, 110 Wikipedia, 130 Witz, Leslie, 88 Women in Africa, 135 World and a Very Small Place in Africa, The, 93 Writing African History, 96, 115 Xhosa “cattle killing,” 88–­90

Vansina, Jan, 80, 115, 117 victimhood, 106 violence, 108–­9

Zanzibar, 83

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