South Africa is the intellectual epicentre of the ideology of African renaissance and of the growing scholarly attention to decoloniality as an epistemological and aesthetic agenda of decolonisation. Paradoxically, the country is also a xenophobic crime scene: the continental state associated with endemic Afrophobic violence. This is a contradiction with both contemporary and historical significance. Positing this framing of a contradictory impulse should come with a caveat: Black South African intellectual investments in pan-Africanist projects were part of a broader cosmopolitan imaginary necessitated by South African colonial history and were thus partly projects of necessity. The origins of this politics of self-fashioning were not exclusively pan-Africanist.

Inspired by my experiences in archives and research fields in Northern Nigeria, this essay analyzes four overlapping phenomena: archival fragmentation, the politicization of data and research transactions, the proliferation of memoirs and other texts of self-representation, and the question of sensing the African past beyond the recognized oral, written, and ethnographic corpus. At once familiar and novel, these trends present both problems and possibilities for historians of postcolonial Africa, and need to be negotiated carefully. I propose, in preliminary terms, that a complementary methodology of what I call sensing is not only possible but necessary if we want to fully capture the pace and flavor of postcolonial African experiences.