ABSTRACT
Until fairly recently, European and North American historians tended to see the ‘less-developed’ world before contact with the West as static, timeless, inhabited by ‘peoples without history’, as in English historian H.R. TrevorRoper’s famous remark about African history. ‘Perhaps in the future there will be some African history to teach,’ he said in 1963. ‘But at present there is none. There is only the history of Europeans in Africa. The rest is darkness . . . and darkness is not a subject of history.’19 Now, four decades later, as a ‘new’ African history and a ‘new’ American Indian history, both firmly rooted in oral history and a multidisciplinary approach, take their places in the academic firmament, Trevor-Roper’s Eurocentric worldview is likely to find few adherents. Historians today are more likely to agree with anthropologists Brian Ferguson and Neil Whitehead that ‘all societies have the same amount of history behind them. European explorers only step into local history; they do not set it in motion’.20
