Modernity imagined, the nation exhumed: historiography and postcolonialism in West Africa
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.53872/2422.7544.n8.9933Keywords:
African Historiography, Atlantic Slave Trade, Posctocolonialism, Dahomey, Nation States FormationAbstract
This article poses a theoretical reflection about the main concerns in African historiography produced in the ‘70, period of its academic consolidation. The coeval creation of independent nation states becomes a starting point to analyze in those historical writings– produced by African historians, normally as the Ph D Thesis submitted at metropolitan universities— the urgency to create a vernacular historical version of political modernity, together with the hallmark of native, “endogenous” narratives. In this sense, I analyze the constant tension between translation and rejection of European historical and theoretical thinking. Particularly I take in this article the writings of I. A. Akinjogbin –a prominent historian of slave trade—trying to put in context his thinking with the academic struggles, to allocate Africa (in this specific case Dahomey, current Benin) into a new “imagined African modernity”. At the same time, this modernity would define the borders, originality and specificity of the “new nations”.
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