ABSTRACT
This chapter discuses the Role of Marxism in Sub-Saharan and South African Historiography, as history became an academic discipline in Sub-Saharan Africa, oral traditions were not discounted but considered as important sources of the African past. They required methods different from those of textual analysis central to the modern Western tradition. The chapter describes the historiography, as it developed generally in Sub-Saharan Africa in the period of decolonization after World War II and then looks more closely at historiographical developments in three very different African states, Nigeria, Tanzania, and South Africa. Soon as Arabic and European writing became established in Sub-Saharan Africa, local scholars began to compile written records of oral traditions and writing chronicles of current events. The Ibadan School sought to free itself from the basic worldview of Western scholarship, yet has been pointed out by its critics, in its attempt to place African historiography on a solid scholarly foundation, it took over basic elements of Western historiography.
