WRITTEN SOURCES AND THE RECONSTRUCTION OF AFRICAN HISTORY: THE NIGERIAN EXAMPLE

WRITTEN SOURCES AND THE RECONSTRUCTION OF AFRICAN HISTORY: THE NIGERIAN EXAMPLE

Shehu Sule PhD

Department of History

FCT College of Education Zuba-Abuja

shehusule997@gmail.com

Abstract

Written sources are part of various other sources that make up for what historians use in the reconstruction of history. The art of writing on its part is a civilization that developed at different times in different societies. Societies that developed the art of writing early enough committed most of their history to writing while those that did not develop such craft early, committed theirs to memory. In the reconstruction of history, historians make use of all sources available, as no single source is immune to human manipulation, consciously or unconsciously.  The coming of the Europeans with their colonial rule was not the beginning of the history of Africa, for they claim to have introduced the art of reducing the history of Africa to writing. The Egyptians had for a long time developed the art of writing known as hieroglyphs, which contributed immensely to the knowledge of their past as well as some other societies they met. In the Nigerian area, the nsibidi writing was associated with the people of Ejiagham and some parts of Igboland.All of these existed before the coming of the Europeans. Besides, Arab Muslim travellers and missionaries who began to visit Africa as far back as the 8th century A.D., made the major inroad into the use of writing to put down Africa’s past. These Arabs and the subsequent indigenous Muslim writers that emerged in the Empires and states that evolved in the Nigerian area made much data available in writing before the advent of colonialism.

Keywords: Written Sources, Reconstruction, African History, Nigerian Example

Introduction

The task of reconstructing the past is a herculean one for the historian. The difficulty hinges on the fact that when actors or eyewitnesses are no more alive to give evidence, the historian is left with no option but to rely on inanimate sources or verbal information handed down from generation to generation. Huge efforts and critical analysis must therefore be deployed to arrive at a near historical truth. Much of Africa’s past was reconstructed from oral sources and archaeological evidence, mostly because the continent was not blessed with a sophisticated art of writing. The art of writing developed by ancient Egyptians was essentially symbolic and not narrative; neither did the knowledge spread to much of the African continent. The coming of the Arab Muslims and the introduction of Islam with its Arabic script began the process of effective documentation of much of the history of the African continent. At that point also, only events related to some centralized polities were put on record, with only vague references about other societies that the former encountered. More so, only societies that embraced Islam earlier benefitted immensely from such writings. If the number of states, empires and non-centralized polities in the African continent is anything to go by, only a small fraction or percentage had their past written down by early Islamic travellers. The implication of this is that the inhabitants of the African continent did not have their past written down at the same time, but they were in stages.

While some societies had their histories committed to writing by early Islamic travellers, others began with the coming of European explorers, missionaries and trading companies. Furthermore, the reconstruction of the history of some other societies began with Western education that came with colonial conquest. This however does not mean that such societies had no history; they only did not have their history in written form.  In view of the unfortunate position of Africa as a continent with no sophisticated art of writing, many of her rich past must certainly have been lost while oral tradition could alter the originality of some other aspects of the history. Judaism, Christianity and Islam have survived and sustained among the Jews and Arabs and spread to the rest of the World largely due to their knowledge of writing. Even if the African society had prophets and messengers more than the Jews and Arabs, the absence of the art of writing might have acted as impediment. Although written sources have their flaws and demerits, they have however proven to be more reliable and longer lasting than oral tradition in particular. The absence written sources in Africa does not necessarily translate to lack of history of Africa; there are other sources of history that revealed much of Africa’s history before the emergence of the art of writing. Such sources that proved a lot of Africa’s past include oral tradition, archaeology and linguistic evidence among others.

Written Sources in Africa

Written sources are data recorded in written form and kept in diverse ways and places, including political, religious, social and economic records. They may also include private records such as those found in personal diaries, letters and various other correspondences. The information derived from written sources are necessary to reconstruct past events which must be derived from evidence of some kind. Evidence may be clearly arranged and documented in written form or scattered on the surface of the earth, beneath the earth, on stones, trees or in the memory of men. Until recently when inter-disciplinary and multi-disciplinary approaches assumed importance to historical writing, sources have been limited to archaeology, oral traditions and written records.¹

Two broad ways of differentiating these various sources are written and unwritten sources.

Written sources can include files, court documents, financial papers, newspapers, old family papers or official files. All these written sources can be used by historians to find out about the past. They might not have been created for that purpose but they are still very useful.²The use of written sources in Africa can be classified into various forms, with particular reference to the Egyptian hieroglyphics, Nsibidi writings, Arab Muslim writings and Western education. Hieroglyphics is a system of writing with pictures that represent words or sounds.³ The ancient Egyptians evolved and used this system of writing. Egyptian hieroglyphics were formal writing systems used in ancient Egypt. Hieroglyphs combined logographic, syllabic and alphabetic elements, with a total of some 1000 distinct characters. The use of hieroglyphic writing arose from proto-literate symbol systems in the early Bronze Age, between the 32^nd and 28^th centuries B.C.⁴The symbols of hieroglyphic writings may be a representation of the objects they depict. Hieroglyph or “sacred carving” is a Greek translation of the Egyptian phrase “the god’s word”. For more than 2000 years, hieroglyphic writing was used in Egypt, but the coming of Christianity and the introduction of Greek alphabets caused disuse of the native Egyptian script. Hieroglyphics was last known to be used in 394 A.D.⁵

The Ekoi people or Ejagham in present day Nigeria had developed a form of ideographic writing, the Nsibidi, long before European incursion. Nsibidi was used to communicate messages and todecorate items such as calabashes, sculptures and clothing. There are indications that the Nsibidi

was adopted by some Igbo groups from the Ekoi. Nsibidi was exported to the Caribbean islands of

Cuba, Venezuela, Jamaica and Haiti as a result of the Atlantic slave trade. The advent of western education and Christianity have however diminished Nsibidi literacy.⁶

Islam and its art of writing came to the area of North Africa before spreading to other parts of Africa through Arab travellers. As for the people of the savannah, Islam came to the region in the eighth century A.D., the effective date from which the written history of West Africa began. Some writings of Arab Muslim chronicles about West Africa appeared in the works of Ibn Munnabeh written in A.D. 738, followed later by Al-Masudi in A.D. 947.⁷ Furthermore, the writing of the history of the empires of the savannah or Western Sudan was initially undertaken by Arab geographers and historians such as Al-Masudi, Al-Bakri, Ibn Battuta and Ibn Khaldun. As from the 16^th century, works of indigenous Muslim scholars of the Sudan emerged. They include Abd Al Rahman Al-Sa’di who wrote Tarikh al-Sudan and Mahmud Kati who wrote Tarikh al-Fettach.⁸

Perspectives in African History

The two major perspectives in African history are the Eurocentric and Afrocentric perspectives. 

The first perspective contends that the writing of African history was pioneered by non-Africans, especially European explorers, Christian Missionaries, travellers, anthropologists and ethnographers who wrote in order to justify their colonial imposition on Africans. These groups of writers made use of various devices including scientific explanation as demonstrated by the Hermitic hypothesis which emphasizes racial superiority of Europeans over black Africans to justify their false claims. These views held by many European historians who claim that Africa lay in an un-historic part of the World was clearly stated in the remarks of Richard Borton and

A.P. Newton as evidence of this prejudiced view of the Africa’s past, when they assert that:

It is manifest that want of self-control distinguishes the character of the Negroes. This condition is capable of no development or culture, and as we have seen them at this day, such have they always been. At this point we leave Africa, not even to mention it again. For it is no historical part of the World; it has no movement or development to exhibit.⁹

This position is re-enforced and even made concrete when the German School of History claimed that only written sources could provide a proper basis for history. A.P. Newton echoed this theory when he claimed that Africa has no history until the coming of the Europeans. According to him, history only begins when men take to writing.¹⁰ The Afro-centric perspective however maintains a contrary view of the argument. By its contention, indigenous written records were not entirely absent in Africa prior to the coming of the Europeans. One of the oldest scripts in the world was from ancient Egypt, the deciphering of which in the 1890s pushed the boundary between history and pre-history back thousands of years.¹¹

The Egyptians developed a form of writing known as hieroglyphs, with the recordings not only on tablets, woods and stones, but on a paper-like plant material called papyrus. An appreciable amount of information about the Egyptian past was made available through this system of writing. 

Much information about Ethiopian history from the 5^th century AD was derived from written sources. The Ethiopian Coptic Church, one of the earliest Christian Churches, used a written language called Ge’ez to translate the Bible and record its landholdings, its prayers, healing formulae and the lives of its saints. To these ecclesiastical documents were added royal chronicles and medieval compilations of law and history such as the KebreNegast, “The Glory of the Kings”, which is the ideological charter of Ethiopian kingship.¹² By the 8^th century A.D. onwards, previous fragments of information on sub-Saharan Africa began to emerge from accounts of Muslim travellers and geographers. These sources have proved exceedingly important in the recovery of the early history of the Sudanic kingdoms and of the Swahili city-states of the east-coast of Africa. Even though most of these written documents are personal impressions of outsiders, they nonetheless provide a background for the reconstruction of African history.¹³

There was more to African history than written sources actually provided. If the popular Eurocentric assertion of “no document, no history” is to be analysed, the question that must be asked is what is document? If by document we mean written account, then a lot of history all over the world would be unaccounted for. However, if our traditional meaning of document is given emphasis, provision would be made for the study of African history. Of considerable importance were the special symbols and signs used in some societies. It has even been established for instance that some form of writing called Nsibidi existed among the Calabar of Southern

Nigeria.¹⁴ That such form of writing was not able to capture reign of kings, conquests, defeats and trade relations among others was not enough to conclude that such society had no history.

Written sources, where they exist, are not enough to reconstruct history. Comparative analysis, with regards to other sources such as oral tradition, archaeology, anthropology, linguistics, and geology, just to mention but a few, must take place before reaching a conclusion. All of these are important evidences which can be used in the history of pre-literate Africa. Many centuries earlier, locally written Arabic chronicles appeared south of the Sahara. First was the Kilwa Chronicles, recounting the history of the coastal town of Kilwa in present day Tanzania (c.1520), followed by Ahmad B. Furtuwa’s account of the central Sudanic state of Bornu (c.1576). This was closely followed by the two great Timbuktu Chronicles, the TarikhAlfattash (Completed in c.1665) and al Sadi’sTarikh al Sudan, also completed same year.¹⁵ Moreover, from the 18^thcentury, Arabic scripts also became the basis for the transliteration of three major languages, Hausa, Fulfulde and Swahili. Following the planting in 1652 of a Dutch Colony at the Cape of Good Hope in what became South Africa, there has been access to documents written in Dutch language and increasingly in its developing offspring Afrikaans.¹⁶

Development of Modern Historiography in Nigeria

The development of an Afrocentric approach to the use of written record in the reconstruction of African history during the colonial and post-colonial era is a bold attempt to address the biasagainst African history. There are two phases in the writing of African history during this period, the patriotic phase and the veteran phase.¹⁷During the patriotic phase, there were some handfuls of African patriots who were not professional historians but took history as a vocation, writing via mere patriotic zeal. Their main concern was to write or rewrite the local history of their environments to counter some previously unfavourable beliefs. For example, Chief Oyerinde’sHistory of Ogbomosho was written to correct the history of Ogbomoso town as relayed in Akinyele’sHistory of Ibadan. In the same phase, others such as Jacob Egbarevba’sShort History of Benin published in 1934 and Samuel Johnson’s The History of the Yoruba, published in 1921, were written to correct some previously held impressions.¹⁸No matter the shortcomings of these works, they however laid the necessary foundations for what could be referred to as modern African historiography which the second phase of academic professionals or the veterans built upon.

The second phase, otherwise described as the beginning of modern African historiography, was essentially a phenomenon of the post-World War II nationalism and decolonization process in Africa.¹⁹A new group of African professional historians had to struggle to shape African history as an academic pursuit that can be accepted universally. In their attempt to justify the claim, they had to go into details, applying wide range of research concepts in order to illustrate their points.

Despite the limited resources at their disposal, they had to follow a pattern, which was a series of local studies, drawing comparisons from records of early travellers, explorers, and missionaries, oral traditions and archaeological evidence where available.

The Strength of Written Sources in the Reconstruction of History

In tropical Africa, some prominent Nigerian scholars wereamong the early professional historians to delve into historiography. K.O. Dike, who wrote his Ph.D. thesis in 1950 for Kings College London titled “Trade and Politics in the Niger-Delta 1830-1855” and S. Biobaku, who in1951 completed his Ph.D. thesis titled “The Egba and their Neighbours” were among the early writers. Both works were revolutionary and first of a kind in the sense that Afrocentric approach to African history was highly adopted as their major theme of research.²⁰Another example is Y.A. Ibrahim’s work on the Ebira, “The Search for Leadership in a Nigerian Community: Igbirra-Tao, c.1865-1954”, a 1968 M.A. thesis of Ahmadu Bello University Zaria.²¹ The contents of Ibrahim’s work, his ability to interview a wide range of aged men and women at the time, his interaction with major actors of the new colonial regime and his access to many colonial documents place him in an indisputable position of the father of Ebira historiography. Ibrahim’s work laid the foundation for many other research initiatives on the Ebira for decades after. Early African writers delved into a sort of systematic and analytical use of oral sources to complement written and archival sources. It was because of this transformation in modern World historiography that most contents of history curricular at every level of education became modified to include African history with all its respect and dignity. The curriculum of Colleges of Education is specifically tagged “minimum standard”, thereby affording history teachers the opportunity to successfully include many important themes into the teaching of local history.²²

Limitations of Written Sources

In view of our colonial experience, too much emphasis was given to the value of written sources. The colonizers came with western education and its emphasis on reading and writing in the colonial language. The colonizers began to gather the histories of the colonized territories from mostly oral sources which they put together locally. However, it is important to emphasize here that written sources have their own inherent demerits. This is because written sources may be corrupted in the process of preservation, for instance, written information stored in a flash drive or in a computer may get infected by virus. It may also easily be lost through natural disaster such as fire, rain or insects.²³ They are also prone to deliberate distortions by persons who feel threatened by the contents. In terms of personal letters and correspondences, the interests and sentiments of the writer will certainly be part of his writing. There are instances where only the aggrieved in an encounter decides to reduce experiences to writing, at least for the sake of posterity. Under such circumstance, the writer may put what favours him by deliberately distorting facts or avoiding the truth. As at the time of making use of such data, the historian may not have the opportunity of comparative analysis or correlation of data. The knowledge of this kind of occurrence makes it professionally unwise for the historian to adopt a written source as authentic. It is an integral part of the art of the historian not to accept information at face value. Carr has observed some fundamental limitations of written sources as follows:

 No document can tell us more than what the author of the document thought-what he thought had happened, what he thought ought to happen or would happen or perhaps only what he himself thought he thought. None of these means anything until the historian has got to work on it and deciphered it. The facts, whether found in documents or not, have still to be processed by historians before he can make any use of them.²⁴

In using written documents therefore, historians are to critically analyse the author’s background and motives in collaboration with other sources. The issue of written sources and methodology are to be handled in the context of the ways facts are being handled by the author. Ascertained facts are the basis on which historical knowledge is built. Historians therefore do not accept data preserved in any form, written or otherwise, except with utmost analysis and comparisons. The concept of objectivity in historical reconstruction did not exhibit bias for any source, all sources, written or not, must be scrutinized by the historian before being presented as history. By the late 19^th century, Von Ranke had postulated in favour of objectivity, he saw it as achievable. According to him, the hallmark of historical reconstruction is to present history as it happened. He thereby put certain conditions in place, which can help the historian attain objectivity. The historian must use only those facts and evidences that have direct relevance to the event. The historian must approach his task devoid of emotions. At all times, the historian must live above the temptations of the moment. The historian must allow the facts to speak for themselves.²⁵

Conclusion

As a study of the past, historical facts are not derived from written sources alone. The human race emerged before the advent of the art of writing. The art of writing is a product of civilization and advancement. There are other sources that contribute to the reconstruction of history apart from written sources, because written evidence or data alone cannot be termed history until the historian has put all enabling factors in place. The Eurocentric view of Africa as a continent without history until the coming of colonialism has been challenged by the Afrocentric view.History has established the presence of great civilizations across the continent before the coming of the Europeans. Using written sources as challenge, the Egyptians developed the idea of hieroglyphs close to 5000 years before the Europeans came with colonialism. By the 8^th century A.D., records of Arab Muslim travellers and missionaries had much to say about the history of tropical Africa, a period of up to 1000 years before the advent of colonialism.In an effort to counter the Eurocentric view of Africa’s past, some patriotic writers emerged, beginning from the 19^th century, to attempt to put the history of their own communities in record forms. Later on in the 20^th century, professional historians or veterans emerged and began to use a combination of sources to reconstruct the history of their communities. These professionals, such as K.O. Dike, S. Biobaku and Y.A. Ibrahim, just to mention but a few, laid the foundation upon which the contemporary history of their communities rest.

Endnotes

_____________________________

1. S.A. Jika and S. Sule, “The Role of Written Sources in the Reconstruction of African History”, Capital

 Journal of Educational Studies (CAJES), Vol. 4, No. 2, 2016, p.193.

2.https://community.dur.ac.uk/4schools.resources/History/Writtenintro .htm

3. www.dictionary.com>brouse>hie

4. en.m.wikipedia.org

5.https://www.britannica.com/topic/hieroglyph

6. https://guardian.ng/life/a-look-at-nsibidi-the-long-lost-african-writing

7. T. Shaw, “The Approach Through Archeology to Early West African History” in J.F. Ade Ajayi and I. Espie (eds.), A Thousand Years of West African History, Ibadan: Heineman, 1965, p.44.

8. B. Awe, “Empires of the Western Sudan: Ghana, Mali, Songhai” in J.F. Ade Ajayi and I. Espie (eds.), A Thousand Years of West African History, Ibadan: Heineman, 1965, p.55.

9. O.E. Uya, “Trends and Perspective in African History” in Erim, E.O. (ed.), Perspectives and Methods of Studying African History, Enugu: Fourth Dimension Publishers, 1984, p.52.

10. Ibid., p.53.

11. T.O. Oshadare, “The History of Modern African Historiography” in Odey, M.O. (ed.), History Research and Methodology in Africa, Makurdi: Aboki Publishers, 2007, p.97.

12. Ibid., p.98.

13. .Ibid.

14. Ibid., p.101.

15. Jika and Sule, “The Role of…, p.195.

16. Ibid.

18. J.O. Samuel, “Written Documents and Historical Reconstruction, Concepts in Historiography”, Essays in Honour of Prof. O. Akinwumi, Nassarawa State University, 2011.

19. Oshadare, “The History of…p.104.

20. Ibid.

21. Y. A. Ibrahim, “The Search for Leadership in a Nigerian Community: Igbirra-Tao, c.1865-1954” (unpublished M.A. thesis, A.B.U. Zaria), 1968.

22. National Commission for Colleges of Education, Nigeria Certificate in Education Minimum Standards, 2012 Edition.

23. Jika and Sule, “The Role of…, p.197.

24. E. H. Carr, What is History?, London: Pengium Books, 1961, p.17.

25. A. Boldt, “Objectivity and History, Rethinking History”, The Journal of Theory and Practice, DO I., March 2014, p.8.

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