All the acts of the drama of world history were performed before a chorus of laughing people. Without hearing this chorus we cannot understand the drama as a whole.

Mikhail Bakhtin

In the last three or four years we have witnessed an upsurge of interest in African popular art forms so strong that it promises to become a movement. The individual researchers scattered over the continent, who for decades have been pursuing their interest in these arts in isolation, are suddenly finding that there is a forum emerging. Issues formerly raised piecemeal, mainly in short articles and often as a sideline by people whose principal expertise lay in some better-established field, are now getting full-scale treatment in the detailed monographs that are appearing from different parts of Africa. It seems the right moment to set out the scope and possibilities of this field, and to lay claim to a central position for it in the humanities and social sciences.

The most obvious reason for giving serious attention to the popular arts is their sheer undeniable assertive presence as social facts. They loudly proclaim their own importance in the lives of large numbers of African people. They are everywhere. They flourish without encouragement or recognition from official cultural bodies, and sometimes in defiance of them. People too poor to contemplate spending money on luxuries do spend it on popular arts, sustaining them and constantly infusing them with new life.

In the history of the cooperative movement in anglophone Cameroon, women's cooperatives have played a particularly small role. Although the first cooperatives opened in the anglophone portion of the country in the 1920s and a small-scale women's project was attempted in the 1950s, the currently existing cooperatives for women began only in 1970. Today, in terms of number of members, amount of capitalization, scale of economic transactions, number of viable (or even operating) organizations, or any other measure, the women's cooperatives account for only a small portion of the total cooperative movement.

In early 1970, beginning in the southern, coastal portions of the then West Cameroon state (the anglophone state in the bilingual Federal Republic of Cameroon) several governmental bodies and the women's wing of the Cameroon National Union (WCNU) began to organize women in urban areas in palm oil cooperatives. A number of societies came into being in a short period of time and the idea soon spread from its original site in the Southwest Province to the Northwest Province. Most of the original structures established in the coastal area have failed, but those in the Northwest Province continue to exist, though with a mixed record of success. Although in many respects the experiments in the Southwest and Northwest were similar, there are differences in purpose, governmental involvement, and social situation that may be related to the differences in success. Interviews with Cameroon officials and foreign assistance workers, archival and documentary material, and personal observations during two periods of research in Cameroon (1975-76 and 1980-81) have provided the data upon which to compare and analyze these two experiences.

In October 1986, in conjunction with the annual meeting of the African Studies Association, a series of panels was convened to commemorate the founding of the African Studies Program at the University of Wisconsin twenty-five years previously. By many criteria this had been a successful program in promoting African studies as an academic field in the United States, in part because from the earliest years the program had looked to the future development of the discipline. It was fitting, therefore, that this “commemoration” not simply be an exercise in recalling the “glorious past” but instead be given to reviewing the development of the field over that period, and to looking ahead to likely trends in the academic understanding of Africa in the coming years.

The articles included in this symposium were first presented at panels organized as part of this commemoration. As befitting the occasion, they were intended to be reflective rather than critical, exploratory rather than definitive, ranging freely over the themes and features that have characterized the study of African history at the University of Wisconsin over that period. But it was also felt that despite the occasion that engendered them, these papers all had the potential of a wider audience, in part because they addressed issues characteristic of African historical studies in this country in general, with both their strengths and drawbacks.

These papers were presented at two panels of very different orientation, and that organization has been maintained here. One category, consisting of articles by Ewald, Spear, and Harms, dealt with “The Craft of the Historian.” These papers examined three related dimensions to historical inquiry in Africa: historians' relations to their sources, the analytic skills needed to assess the data, and the conceptual issues involved in historical understanding. Another panel dealt with the theme “Future Trends and Perspectives in African History.” This set of papers addressed the recent development of certain fields of inquiry and projected the likely trends of such studies over the coming years.

Karin Barber's thoughtful and substantial overview of popular arts in Africa comes at a critical juncture in the development of this field of study. Only in the past decade has a dialogue been initiated among scholars in the various disciplines who study popular arts. Barber's essay stands as an important contribution to this dialogue. Her commentary reflects the richness and complexity of this potential field of study whose purview includes visual, literary, and performance arts.

Studies of the popular arts consistently describe them as topical, new, innovative, and modern. Most scholars, Barber included, identify the emergence of an African popular art with one setting and one period, the urban colonial and post-colonial world.

A plethora of new arts combining local African and Western forms have emerged and been documented precisely during this period. Barber identifies this syncretism as a characteristic feature of African popular art. She argues persuasively that many contemporary urban popular arts seem to derive their vitality and energy from the scale and tempo of this change and to be fundamentally about this change. Although this definition of popular arts in Africa is especially seductive to scholars because of the scale and tempo of change in the colonial and post-colonial urban setting, it risks too close an identification of African popular arts with one period and setting and denies them any history within the pre-colonial era and within non-urban settings.

The ahistorical tendency of most studies of popular arts arises in part from scholars' retention of a Western model of art which categorizes the arts as folk/traditional, popular, and elite. Barber notes that the Western tripartite classification is still invoked with only minor modifications in most accounts of African popular arts. The paradigm which characterized African traditional society and its arts as closed, consensual and unchanging has been successfully challenged in the past decades by Africanists in history, anthropology, and art history. Few scholars would now assert that “traditional” societies or their arts were ever static or frozen. Yet, it is still tacitly held in studies of popular arts that African “traditional” arts are monolithic and undifferentiated in their local setting and thus they are all subject to the same rate of change.

To state that government policy has been at the heart of the agrarian crisis in Lusophone Africa is not to deny the importance of drought, the depressed state of international commodity markets, and externally-provoked destabilization in contributing to food shortages and declining volumes of agricultural exports. Rather, this essay argues that commercial, fiscal, and exchange rate policies and the response of the majority of rural producers to them were the most important factors determining the conditions of production and trade during the period 1974-1984.

In her review of the literature on the food crisis in Africa, Sara Berry (1983) singles out the secular struggle over access to resources as motivating African governments in their policy-making. The crisis in Lusophone Africa can be viewed as a struggle between state officials and peasants over the amount and disposition of marketable surpluses. In each of the countries, politicians and bureaucrats sought control over the marketing and pricing of agricultural products and over the importation of basic consumer goods more as a means of securing state revenues and personal gain than as an instrument for promoting rural development Resistance to exploitative policies by food and export crop producers has been the main reason for the agricultural decline until at least 1984. This resistance manifested itself in various ways: diminished production, parallel markets, smuggling, emigration and support for anti-government forces.

Such behavior has been described before, notably by Robert Bates in his work Markets and States in Tropical Africa (1981). Bates examined how the governments of Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya, Tanzania, Zambia, the Sudan and the Ivory Coast squeezed the incomes of small rural cultivators through taxation, overvalued exchange rates, and monosoponistic marketing boards. Bates explained that governments were attempting to extract revenues and export commodities for financing the state apparatus as well as cheap food and raw materials in the interests of urban industrialists and workers.

Fieldwork fascinates us, at least those of us who have done fieldwork. Whenever two or more fieldworkers gather, they begin to exchange fieldwork stories. But as those of us who have worked with oral narratives know, people tell stories for reasons. Our stories are more than “just stories.” By telling stories, we try to come to terms with an experience and to convey to others what it was like. Why do memories of fieldwork preoccupy fieldworkers so? If fieldwork stories belong to a genre, they are bildungsroman. Fieldwork allowed fieldworkers to reexperience the intense education of childhood, but with an adult consciousness. They entered the field as children and were educated by the people with whom they lived. Even the most basic skills that our parents taught us when were toddlers — eating and personal hygiene — had to be relearned in the field. The education of fieldwork is such a powerful experience because it is a total experience: physical, social, and cognitive. Here I address the cognitive or intellectual aspect of fieldwork. But, even as I focus on fieldwork as an intellectual experience, I must note that the cognitions acquired during the fieldwork take on special power because they derive energy from those physical and social experiences.

The dichotomy between the hedgehog and the fox lies at the core of this essay. Isaiah Berlin translates the Greek poet Archilocus: “the fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing” (Berlin, 1978: 22). The fieldworker's knowledge is the knowledge of the fox. Berlin elaborates: “There exists a great chasm between those who relate everything to a single central vision” — the hedgehogs — and those whose “thought moves on many levels,” who “seize upon a vast variety of experience” without seeking to fit it into any “unitary inner vision” (Berlin, 1978: 22). This is the fox's perspective, and it is this perspective that gives fieldwork its value and its future.

I have been asked to comment on the implications of a sector of culture being examined as popular within the typology adopted by Karin Barber to describe cultural strata in contemporary African societies. In order to face her enormous and daunting task (an intellectual call to arms which few other scholars would have had the courage, or the wide ranging intellectual ability, to meet so successfully) Barber adopted the standard cultural typology from European models, a typology which she finds discomforting, but never actually rejects:

I contend that this typology emerges again and again because it is innate—not in African societies, but in us. For whatever Indo-European archetypal, psychosexual, or categorically imperative reasons, Western scholars and scholarships are doomed to threes. Aside from our own cultural compulsions, and the attractive contrastive model that this tripartite division of African societies provides, I do not believe that there is any inherent reason why contemporary African culture should be so tri-sected in order to examine a phenomenon which appears to be unitary. I would argue that popular art is better understood as the product of a seamless web spun by the world market place which entangles every class in Africa to a greater or lesser degree, depending on the accessibility of that class to that market. Just as the cultural influences extending from the world market are pervasive, so the response to those influences is essentially the same, whether the respondent/artist is a village gin distiller, an urban bicycle repairer, or a university trained novelist. But this argument grows out of the aesthetic nature of popular art, and it is to that commodity as described by Barber that this argument must turn.

If men could learn from history, what lessons it might teach us! But passion and party blind our eyes, and the light which experience gives is a lantern on the stern, which shines only on the waves behind us!

Coleridge

A contradiction hitherto not adequately examined exists between historical research and policy analysis in modern African studies. The more familiar difficulty between policy-makers, who want answers, and historians and social scientists, who find instead complexity and uncertainty, has been much discussed and is not pursued here. Rather, a more subtle tension operates in the work of those policy analysts who use historical research in their work, particularly when these analysts are government advisors in Africa.

History has always had an equivocal role in policy analysis. On one side, an important part of the profession embraces project evaluation and implementation analysis, both of which can involve historical research. In the former, the analyst tries to understand the impact of a project in terms of its past performance, while the latter uses past performance as the basis for improved design of future projects. On the other side, historical research is not considered an essential part of the analyst's graduate training, at least in the United States. One would be hard-pressed, for example, to find an American public policy school that required history alongside core courses in statistics, microeconomics, law, and political science. This ambivalence over the role of historical research is best illustrated by the unheeded calls analysts themselves have made and continue to make for more historical research in their own profession. In an essay on policy analysis familiar to many U.S.-trained analysts, the author opines “historical genesis is a much underplayed aspect of the analysis of social programs” and recommends that a more overtly historical perspective should inform policy analysis generally (Nelson, 1977: 152; Chapter 8).

In the preceding essay Janet Ewald has rightly stressed the critical importance of field work in revealing the manifold relations among different factors, institutions, and events in the past as well as those between the past and the present. She has also noted the disparate, eclectic, and even anarchic nature of the data obtained, making interpretation and analysis of the data a second, a perhaps even more difficult, hurdle that African historians must face between overcoming the confusions and complexities of field work and confronting the third hurdle of historical analysis. Having collected the evidence, then, our task shifts to its interpretation.

African history has been called the decathalon of the social sciences as we sought to employ seemingly complementary methodologies, data, and theoretical perspectives of history, archaeology, comparative linguistics, anthropology, ethnography, and oral traditions to overcome the limited amount of documentary material available to us. The move was an audacious assault on disciplinary boundaries, but one that sometimes resulted in naive uses of data and analysis without proper consideration of the complexities of other fields. Wars between historians and anthropologists have been endemic. But we have all become more sophisticated in our use of other disciplinary perspectives in the process, so that today we see emerging both an increasingly sensitive anthropological history as well as a more subtle historical anthropology.

When his Lord said to him, “Surrender,” he said, “I have surrendered me to the Lord of all Being.” Koran, II, 125.

Every verse of the Koran has “an outside and an inside” (Lings, 1977: 29).

The full-grown Sufi is thus conscious of being, like other men, a prisoner of a world of forms, but unlike them he is also conscious of being free, with a freedom which immeasurably outweighs his imprisonment. He may therefore be said to have two centres of consciousness, one human and one Divine, and he may speak now from one and now from another, which accounts for certain apparent contradictions (Lings, 1977: 14).

The dominant forms of Islam which have penetrated sub-Saharan Africa in the last few centuries when Islam has taken hold of what are now predominantly Muslim regions (like the Eastern Sudan and West Africa) have been Sufi. Trimingham's (1959: 92) disparaging assessment that “(t)he orders in West Africa became ordinary non-esoteric religious associations… [which] rarely have anything to do with mysticism…,” and that “the ordinary member knows nothing of the mysticism upon which his order is based,” finds its echo in Lewis' (1980: 18) view that “their esoteric content is generally not strongly developed.” Nonetheless, the literary effusions of certain prominent African Muslim authors, like Camara Laye, Cheikh Hamidou Kane, and Tayeb Salih, seem to find inspiration in a well-defined, long-standing mystical tradition—one which has generated literary forms in addition to having supplied the ideological framework utilized by these authors. This framework varies somewhat less than do the forms adopted by the authors: Laye's and Kane's fictionalized autobiographical accounts seem to be worlds apart from the folktale or Romance which share certain qualities with Salih's Wedding of Zein and Laye's Le Regard du roi, although the two models meet, curiously enough, in Lave's Dramouss and in Salih's Season of Migration to the North.

Popular arts are an effervescent and protean aspect of contemporary culture in Africa. Karin Barber's overview captures the styles, flavor, and general sociological significance of these art forms for both artists and consumers. Noting a lack of theoretical synthesis in the field, the author begins with a critique of the tripartite “European model” of folk, popular, and elite art. She aptly remarks that this model obscures analysis by relegating popular art in Africa to an “undefined and shapeless space” between folk and elite art. Moreover, Barber is concerned with the role that the popular arts play as expressive acts that reflect particular social, political, and economic relationships.

John Maynard Keynes (1936: 383) once wrote that “practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist.” We historians are practical people who pride ourselves on our attention to facts and our painstaking reconstruction of detail. And yet our criteria for deciding which data are relevant, our categories for arranging data, and our approach to interpreting data are often influenced by models drawn from the social sciences. The social sciences, in turn, have borrowed many of their models from the natural sciences. And models in the natural sciences, it turns out, are often based on analogies to machines. Like the practical men referred to by Keynes, we often apply these models in an intuitive, almost unconscious, fashion, but they are no less influential for being unacknowledged. The twenty-fifth anniversary of the Wisconsin African Studies Program provides us with an opportunity to pause and look at some of the models that have influenced us.

The African Studies Association in 1984 gave Paulin Hountondji a share in the Melville Herskovits award for the most significant Africanist publication for the previous year. The selection of Hountondji's book, African Philosophy: Myth and Reality (1983), suggests, logically, that the Association believes the book to be a significant contribution to African Studies. One might go even a step further and conclude that it indicates the Association's concurrence with the main premises and the general philosophical orientation of the author's arguments. This paper outlines some serious questions Hountondji and his fellow philosophers raise about what one's attitude to the African past should be and what criteria should dictate the course of development on the African continent.

Hountondji is perhaps the best known of the “professional philosophers.” As one would expect, each of the philosophers perceives the issues that will be raised in this discussion from a different perspective, even when they agree broadly on the critique of ethnophilosophy; Hountondji has nevertheless emerged as the most articulate and representative in this regard, to the extent that his book has earned the title, “the ‘bible’ of anti—ethnophilosophers” (Mudimbe, 1985: 199). The focus of this essay will accordingly be on this important work, with occasional references, of course, to those of others, in particular the Ghanaian Kwasi Wiredu. This strategy has the attraction of straddling the divide between Anglophone and Francophone manifestations of the new philosophical attitudes.

To best understand what grounds there might be for objections to certain of the philosophers' positions, it is expedient that one isolate the several targets of their disparagement. Chief of these is ethnophilosophy, which Hountondji (1983: 34) defines as “an ethnological work with philosophical pretensions.” This includes the works of all those who like Placide Tempels, Alexis Kagame, John Mbiti, and other ethnologists have attempted to articulate African philosophies or systems of thought. Another target is African cultures or traditions themselves, as distinct from whatever the ethnophilosophers or ethnologists might correctly or mistakenly have made of them.

Karin Barber has written a probing paper on, in her phrase, a “fugitive category,” and one of the merits of her approach is her willingness to dwell on the fugitive quality of her subject as much as on the categorical. To discuss the popular arts is to discuss the nature of the populace, and to stress the ambiguous definition of the producers and the audience of such artistic expression is to recognize the inchoate, uncertain, changeable nature of urban African society. Barber both recognizes this and suggests ways of going further. Her insistence that expression in its various forms be taken seriously—that Africanists listen to the cassettes being played on the streets, look at paintings on walls, and read market literature—points to one of few ways in which people's concerns, conceptions of themselves, and ideas about the world can be studied, not assumed. “Decoding” this enormously varied body of texts—as her examples suggest—can be extremely valuable to Africanists with many concerns.

Much of the discussion of Barber's paper when presented to the African Studies Association meeting focused on defining categories more than on their fugitive nature. The problem is real enough: her distinction among traditional arts, popular arts, and elite arts raises boundary problems: are the three clearly separable? do these divisions correspond to any meaningful classification of the populace? But if academics' instinctive tendency is to define boundaries more precisely—or to make typologies more specific—Barber's paper suggests that ambiguity is itself a social fact.

Barber, writing about creative expression, finds that the concept of “popular” has very similar ambiguities to those discovered by social scientists studying populism. The difficulty with identifying the “populace,” the “people,” or the “masses” as a category is that it does not necessarily correspond to any particular relationship to the means of production, to any particular cultural characteristics, or to any particular set of aspirations, definitions of self, and set of relationships. African societies are complex and highly ramified: people live for and sometimes die for subcategories.

This is an essay offering some random thoughts on the progress that has been made on research in African history since the early 1960s and what the writer sees as the research tasks that must still be addressed in future. In this introductory portion, a number of general issues are raised about the current state of the craft. It is a section in which the ground is cleared, as it were, for the main task of the paper which is dealt with in the subsequent three sections. There, an attempt will be made to come to grips with the most topical findings of the research that has gone on, and to point out the gaps that have yet to be filled, in the main sub-disciplines of political, economic, and social history. The examples used to illustrate the argument have been largely drawn from east, central, and southern Africa, this being the part of the continent with whose history the writer is most familiar. Furthermore, being neither original nor empirically based, this essay is essentially a review of work others have done on various facets of African history. While assessing that work, it should nonetheless also serve as a pointer to areas of investigation that seem not to have received adequate attention, areas to which effort might well be directed in future.

It should be noted, to begin with, that historians of Africa have been extremely good at asking new questions of their discipline and its sources. The result is that African historiography has been characterized by different traditions of historical inquiry and knowledge (Zeleza, 1983:9-42). In other words, in a bid to enhance our conceptual understanding of past African experience, historians have had recourse to one paradigm or framework of analysis or another, to the extent of making possibilities seem endless. All this has been generally viewed as a healthy development, but it is one which poses a serious challenge to one called upon to identify and offer informed opinion on the research tasks to which future attention should be directed.

When I presented the first version of this paper at Madison, I was still in the middle of wrestling with many of the elusive and intractable problems it raised. Dealing with some issues led to kicking others into the margins, where they lurked balefully as enormously extended footnotes. The critical comments of my colleagues were extremely helpful in restoring some perspective and bringing some of the marginalized issues back into the center. But what is published here is still far from a finished statement—it merely represents another stage in the continuing struggle with the hydra.

Mary Jo Arnoldi, in particular, addressed herself to the part of the paper that had become most distorted by my struggle: the part that examines the usual distinction between popular, traditional and elite and attempts to rescue something of value from this hackneyed triad. This was the part of the paper that I was most uneasy about and that I have revised most since the presentation. Since Arnoldi did not have the opportunity to see the revised version before her comments were published, some of her very good points have now been pre-empted. But much of what she says still stands and offers me an opportunity both to disagree about certain issues and also to clarify some aspects of my argument.

In the first version of my paper I did not sufficiently acknowledge the existence of unofficial or popular traditions within pre-colonial cultures. As Arnoldi points out, my picture of the “popular” was ahistorical because I located it in only one epoch, the colonial and post-colonial one. Because I was trying to come to grips with the indefinite, shapeless, and fluid area covered by popular in most scholarly writing, I inadvertently reified what was on the margins of this area: the “traditional” and the “elite,” turning the traditional in particular into a monolithic entity. As this picture of the traditional was contradicted by my own research on Yoruba oriki (Barber, 1984b) it is not surprising that I felt uneasy about it even before I read Arnoldi's perceptive comments. But unlike Arnoldi, however, I still think that the colonial/post-colonial popular arts form a distinctive though not boundaried field: they are qualitatively different from the unofficial arts of so-called traditional culture, whether pre-colonial or present-day. It seems to me that Arnoldi's own examples of Iteso and Bamana traditional-popular arts illustrate this brilliantly.

Kwasi Wiredu, a prominent African philosopher from Ghana, recently published an essay entitled “How Not To Compare African Thought to Western Thought” (1984) in which he criticized the prevalent method of comparing what is regarded as African philosophy with Western philosophy. Wiredu begins the essay with the assertion that all cultures are characterized by two levels of thought, namely, the traditional non-scientific and the theoretical or scientific thought (p. 149-50). He also notes, although without examples, that some contemporary philosophers both in Africa and the West are in the habit of comparing the traditional non-scientific thought of the African people with the highly theoretical and scientific thought of the Western world. He sees this type of comparison as improper and argues that since there is traditional folk thought in Africa as well as in the West, if there is to be any comparison at all, it must be with folk thought to folk thought and scientific thought to scientific thought (p. 157).

Wiredu's essay is an excellent academic treatise in its own right, but as an African who is attempting to reflect philosophically and possibly attempting to provide leadership for the thrust of African philosophical search, there are some pitfalls in the essay which need to be pointed out. The purpose of this commentary is to highlight and hopefully clarify some of the misleading innuendoes in contemporary literature about African philosophy and the role of an African philosopher within the world of philosophy.

The first problem in Wiredu's essay is that it is sympathetic to the misconceived view that Africans have no thought process except the non-scientific. Assertions like “African Societies are among the closest approximations in modern world to societies in the pre-scientific stage of intellectual development,” betray Wiredu's presupposition. This position creates a problem for Wiredu's project. If, as he has stated, the West is basically scientific in its thought process and Africans are basically folk-like in their thinking, then there is no basis for comparison. His argument that it is wrong to compare African folk thought to Western scientific thought is the arbitrator.

The World Bank, in its controversial 1981 report on problems of African development, came down particularly hard on African governments for having inflated the state sector (World Bank, 1981: 40):

The Berg report, as it is known after its principal author, Elliott Berg, praises African governments for their accomplishments in education and health, but otherwise condemns them for following mistaken, state-centered economic policy. This is not to say, however, that the report praised colonial economic policies by comparison. Here is one of the few paragraphs in the report addressing the era before 1960 (World Bank, 1981: 11):