African Words, African Voices: Critical Practices in Oral History (African Systems of Thought) - Softcover

Until the advent of African independence, Africans were not considered fitting subjects for historical research and their words, voices, and experiences were largely absent from the continent's history. In 13 lively and provocative essays focusing on all areas of Sub-Saharan Africa, oral sources are seen as a way to restore African expression to African history. African Words, African Voices evokes the richness and relevance of oral sources for understanding a complex past for readers at all levels. Contributors include E. J. Alagoa, David William Cohen, Laura Fair, Babacar Fall, Tamara Giles-Vernick, Isabel Hofmeyr, Abdullahi A. Ibrahim, Corinne A. Kratz, Stephan F. Miescher, Bethwell Allan Ogot, Megan Vaughan, Luise White, and Kwesi Yankah.

Luise White teaches African history at the University of Florida. She is author of The Comforts of Home: Prostitution in Colonial Nairobi (for which she won the Herskovits Prize) and Speaking with Vampires: Rumor and History in Colonial Africa. Stephan F. Miescher Associate Professor of History at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is co-editor (with Lisa Lindsay) of Men and Masculinities in Modern Africa and is preparing a book on the construction of masculinities in twentieth-century Ghana. David William Cohen is Professor of History and Anthropology at the University of Michigan. He is author of The Historical Tradition of Busoga, Uganda: Mukama and Kintu; Womunafu's Bunafu; and Towards a Reconstructed Past: Historical Texts from Busoga, Uganda. He is co-author of Siaya: A Historical Anthropology of an African Landscape; Burying SM: The Politics of Knowledge and the Sociology of Power in Africa; and The Combing of History (all with E. S. Atieno Odhiambo). With E. S. Atieno Odhiambo, he is writing on the multiple investigations into the disappearance and death of Kenya's Foreign Minister, Robert Ouko.