Who Writes and Reads African History and Why? Locating African Voices in the Twenty-First Century, From 1960 to the Present

This paper provides an analysis of recent past and current trends in the production and use of African historiography, viewing the changing dynamics and progress of this discipline as products of the politics of knowledge production in the wider domain of African studies throughout the late post-colonial era. On the one hand, we should not encourage radical separatist manifestos preventing non-African historians from writing about the continent. However, there is an urgent need to review the stark imbalances that have resulted in a steadily decreasing participation of African based scholars in the current production and use of historical knowledge. Despite the growing number of institutions of higher learning, and the increasing percentages of African-born and bred scholars that are employed on the continent, the dependency still remains upon foreign powerhouses to deliver definitive African historical narratives and paradigms from outside Africa: in America, the Caribbean, Europe, and more recently in Asia. Because of this, we continue to consume more knowledge from outside than we can export; thereby we fail to be influencing the world with knowledge about Africa produced from within the continent. It remains difficult for participants from within the African continent to control any of the politicised processes of knowledge production; and unfortunately, there appears little that can be done to reverse this situation at the present time

African studies · Art · Colonialism · Development economics · Historiography · Knowledge production · Literature · Narrative · Political science · Politics · Sociology · African history and culture studies · Colonialism, slavery, and trade · Gender Studies · Global Maritime and Colonial Histories · History · Law

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