ABSTRACT
Most of the published history of Africa has been written by Europeans. Approximately until 1960, when the Journal of African History was founded, that history was predominantly an account of what Europeans had done in the continent, from the eighteenth century onwards. In this tradition, nearly everything that had happened before belonged in a vast obscurity best left to archeologists and physical anthropologists. The problem was not simply that there were no documentary archives for a historian to work on, but that Africans had not had any history. The most important new trend was a shift toward the methods of social anthropology, encouraged notably by the teaching of the late Sir Edward Evans-Pritchard, professor of anthropology at Oxford, and Jan Vansina, professor of African history at the University of Wisconsin. The Hamitic hypothesis is readily recognizable in form and function as a myth, a story which purports to tell, simultaneously, past events and an everlasting truth.
