Hegelian Dialectics in Benin Kingdom Historiography

R. A. Sargent's article on Benin Kingdom is challenging, perplexing, and ultimately unsatisfying. The subject is clear: changes in social formations of monarchy and society in the era before the Portuguese arrival. But the nature of the author's approach and hence the nature of his results is set forth in such a shrouded and contradictory fashion that the reader is required to devote an unreasonable effort to deciding what sort of an article it is. Is it an empirical study, in which the author mainly assembles data, but also sketches in a few interpretive outlines? Is it, at the other extreme, a theoretical piece, with just enough data to illustrate the analytical framework? Is it the development of a hypothesis, in which the author organizes data into a fully developed interpretation? Or do we have here the test of a hypothesis, developed elsewhere from theory or from other data, which is to be verified or negated with the evidence at hand? Or, finally, and this would be Sargent's most ambitious intent, do we have here the restatement of a verified historical reconstruction? Most historical writing can be set into one or another of the above five categories. Usually, of course, historians prefer to write with sufficient nuance and subtlety to avoid such explicit categorization of their efforts; their intention, it seems, is to avoid focusing explicitly on formal categories and straightforward deductive logic in hopes of preserving the reader's contact with the complex reasoning and immense number of variables which are unavoidable in real historical situations. Occasionally, however, the subliminal messages conveyed through this indirect style of historical writing fail to weave themselves together into a more profound if implicit comprehension of the situation, and instead collide with each other in the mind of the reader and create confusion, causing him to cry out for an explicit statement of the author's plan of attack. Sargent's study begins with such an authoritative tone that the reader is willing for a moment to consider the possibility that it might be an empirical study setting forth well-established facts, or even a verified historical reconstruction organizing such facts into a demonstrable past reality. But a

Dialectic · Epistemology · Hegelianism · Historiography · Kingdom · Political science · African cultural and philosophical studies · African history and culture analysis · African history and culture studies · Geology · History · Law · Philosophy

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