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Southeastern Nigeria, the Niger-Benue Confluence, and the Benue in the Precolonial Period: Some Issues of Historiography

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 May 2014

A.E. Afigbo
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Extract

The technicians of historical methodology have usually emphasized that the relationship between historians and their facts is, or should be, dialectic. This supposed counsel of perfection, however, glosses over an important point whose neglect is usually, or indeed invariably, a source of serious distortion or error—that is, the fact that such a dialogue can only begin after the historian has already immersed himself in the available sources, and thus has in some way been taken captive by those sources. Indeed, if the historian can manipulate his facts, it appears that his sources can also manipulate him.

Thus the kind of history the historian writes depends all the time on the kind of sources available to him. The more the sources are narrow in focus and unidirectional in orientation, the narrower the range of the historian's work and the more such work is oriented in the direction from which the sources derive. The wider the range of the sources, and the more these are multidirectional, the more the competent and scientific historian is in a position to produce a work that does more justice to the many-faceted experiences of man in society—that is, the more the historian is in a position to take a meaningful aim at the Rankean goal of all historical effort.

This tendency for the historian to be taken captive by the provenance and the main interest of his sources has been, and continues to be, operative among the historians of Nigeria's peoples and polities.

Type
Research Article
Information
History in Africa , Volume 24 , January 1997 , pp. 1 - 8
Copyright
Copyright © African Studies Association 1997

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References

Notes

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2. OG. 263: “Origin, History and Settlement of the Ezza in Abakaliki Division.” See Memo No. 499 of 9 October 1911 (National Archives, Enugu).

3. OW.189/1927 (National Archives, Enugu) Progress Report of Anthropological Officers, SP; Obayemi, A., “The Yoruba and Edo-Speaking Peoples and Their Neighbours before 1600” in Ajayi, /Crowder, , History, 196–263Google Scholar; C. Unoma, “Deities in Gwandara History,” paper read at the 22nd Annual Congress of the Historical Society of Nigeria, 27-30 March 1977 at the University of Benin; idem., “The Abakwariga and Kororofa, etc.” Unpublished seminar paper, Department of History, University of Ibadan, 23 March 1978.

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5. Tamuno, T. N., “Peoples of the Niger-Benue Confluence” in Ajayi, J. F. A. and Espie, I., eds., A Thousand Years of West African History (Ibadan, 1965), 206–16.Google Scholar

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