ABSTRACT
To understand the past involves two very different operations, and to synthesize them is a severe test of historical scholarship. On the one hand historians study change over an extended period of time, and try to discern in what underlying direction the twisting course of events was leading; at the same time they must immerse themselves in the detailed evidence for those events, seeking to do justice to the thoughts and purposes of men whose own conceptions of what they were doing, and where they were going, may now seem to have been ironically mistaken. Both operations present peculiar difficulties in studying events so near in time, and so contentious, as the termination of colonial rule in Africa.
