ABSTRACT
A major intellectual concern of African as well as some Africanist scholars since about 1965 has been how to liberate historical knowledge in Africa from the paradigmatic constraints of European historiography and the colonial library (Mudimbe 1988). Attempts have been made to develop new avenues of inquiry, new sources of historical evidence, and new theoretical perspectives. Each of these developments, beginning with an emphasis on African oral traditions and oral history and more recently finding expression in Marxist critiques of African history, has led to important new ways of constructing the African past. Each in its own way, nonetheless, is constrained by theoretical or analytical frameworks that arise out of European epistemologies or that remain bounded by evidence contained within the colonial library.
