It has differentiated itself from other continental areas of historiography due to its multidisciplinary nature, as Africa's unique and varied methods of recording history have resulted in a lack of an established set of historical works documenting events before European colonialism.
African historiography became organised in the mid 20th century, and saw a movement towards utilising oral sources in a multidisciplinary approach alongside archaeology and historical linguistics, culminating in UNESCO publishing the General History of Africa from 1981, edited by specialists from across the continent.
[3] In African societies, the historical process is largely a communal one, with eyewitness accounts, hearsay, reminiscences, and occasionally visions, dreams, and hallucinations crafted into narrative oral traditions which are performed, sometimes accompanied by music, and transmitted through generations.
[14] Some colonisers took interest in the other viewpoint and attempted to produce a more detailed history of Africa using oral sources and archaeology, however they received little recognition at the time.
[7] Works through the 1960s and 1970s relied upon a wealth of data to conclusively prove that Africans possessed historical consciousnesses and conceptualised, preserved, and transmitted their history through oral tradition.
[11]: 629–630 This movement towards utilising oral sources in a multi-disciplinary approach culminated in UNESCO commissioning the General History of Africa, edited by specialists drawn from across the African continent, publishing from 1981 to the present.
[11]: 628–632 The mid-1960s saw growing pessimism as various socio-political problems such as corruption, economic mismanagement, political instability, social malaise, and neo-colonialism endured, and the failure of African elites to deliver on their promises became apparent.
Celebration of African achievement was replaced by fierce critique of the ruling elites and their neo-colonialist collaborators, and the term Africanist gained negative connotations.
In 1972 Walter Rodney, building on previous works, introduced dependency theory to African historiography by publishing How Europe Underdeveloped Africa.
[17] The onset of the "era of disillusionment" in the 1980s saw African universities struggle amid economic and political crises, resulting in the migration of many great scholars.
The study of history in Africa is critically underfunded, with governments searching for economic development favouring hard sciences and technology-based disciplines, consolidating brain drain.
The new generation of historians are less ideological and emphasise Africans' agency amid economic imperialism, and in a bid to stay relevant focus more on contemporary rather than precolonial history.
[28][29] Basil Davidson considered Africa's ancient period to be until 1000 AD,[18] however Corisande Fenwick has posited the time of the Arab conquests as an endpoint.
[b][35] Historians generally view oral traditions as neither entirely symbolic or wholly true, but a synthesis of the two, requiring great skill and subtlety to separate them.
Historical memory shapes nationalist sentiment on the basis of a shared past, creating a cultural identity, which in turn produces and legitimises nations.
Crucially it aimed to reverse dehumanising colonial thought, especially the notion that Africans had to be divided into tribes and separated in order to be governed, instead promoting unity.
It sought to uncover Africa's contributions to the world, emphasising leadership qualities and institutions in precolonial states, and their integrity and historicity prior to colonisation.
[17] The onset of the "era of disillusionment", as economic development struggled in combination with various internal conflicts, brought tough challenges to nationalist historiography and saw it decline amid growing pessimism and nihilism.
[17] Post-colonialist historiography studies the relationship between European colonial domination in Africa and the construction of African history, and has its roots in the concept of Orientalism.
Western imperialism is viewed as the product of insatiable desire for power over the non-Western world, with this ambition to dominate extending to subjecting cultures to scientific scrutiny.
Historians are challenged with focussing on cultural context while countering the criticism that subscribing to the European-derived idea of "Africa" might render the whole enterprise of African history worthless to the continent's future.
[17][11]: 631 Marxist historiography greatly affected narrative writing and advanced a "cause and effect" interpretation of events, in contrast to them being viewed as a series of accidents or related to divine will.
[7] While the school's generalisations led to the recognition of widespread patterns and the reinterpretation of events (such as the Fula jihads and Yoruba Revolutionary Wars), they sometimes inhibited the study of specific historical situations and often ignored cultural context.
African women's history has grown rapidly since the 1970s, widening its initial focus from economic production, social agency, and law, and has largely on the colonial and postcolonial periods.
[45] It has studied urbanisation, informal and formal economic roles, motherhood, sexuality, reproduction, gender meanings, modernity, and public culture among others.
Its initial efforts were to disprove Eurocentric ideas that economic dynamism, markets, and trade did not play important roles in precolonial Africa.
This approach has been criticised for not taking into account historical changes over long periods, and for compressing history by considering century-old events causal to the present.
Du Bois, and Négritude, advocated by Aimé Césaire and Léopold Sédar Senghor, in the second half of the 20th century African-Americans became closely involved and took greater interest in the study of Africa.
[17] This led to the formulation of Afrocentrism, which sought to challenge Eurocentric assumptions and attitudes dominant in academia, such as the notion of universality in contradiction of differing ontologies and perspectives more relevant to a particular context.
Relatedly, Afrocentricity, coined by Molefi Kete Asante, seeks to ground the study of the peoples of Africa and the African diaspora within their own historical, cultural, and sociological contexts.