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In the Realms of Gold - Pioneering in African History (Hardcover, annotated edition)
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In the Realms of Gold - Pioneering in African History (Hardcover, annotated edition)
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The genial but almost overwhelmingly painstaking autobiography of a
founding figure in the field of African history. In 1947 Oliver
became the first lecturer in African history at the University of
London's School of Oriental and African Studies, and so an
originator of the academic study of precolonial Africa. Oliver's
records of his professional life over five decades have apparently
been superhumanly detailed. Thus, while the anecdotes of his first
cross-continent research trips create sharp snapshots of African
life, the relentless inclusion of minutiae later on (extensive
lists of graduate students and their research topics, or the
precise layouts of Oliver residences in England) makes it almost
impossible to read every word. Those unfamiliar with precolonial
African history will find their heads spinning, albeit pleasantly,
from Oliver's breathless summaries of the far-flung historical and
methodological issues he and his colleagues encountered. But these
do give a feel for what the discipline of African history is like -
its complexity, vastness, and peculiar historiographic problems.
And Oliver's real story is just this - the making of a discipline.
It is one of the happier ironies of colonialism that an
Africa-centered history of that continent should have been made
possible by resources, institutions, and idealism to be found among
its foreign rulers. It's exciting to read of an entire field's
creation by a small group of dedicated and unusually curious
scholars, and its rapid growth, fed by the abundant and challenging
evidence ignored by their dismissively Eurocentric colleagues. The
contemporary history-making of decolonization is gracefully
absorbed into the narrative, as it seems to have been into Oliver's
own appreciation of the continent. While testing the general
reader's patience at times, this should prove an exhaustive
resource for intellectual historians and a fitting foundation myth
for future Africanists to look back to. (Kirkus Reviews)
The core of the book is Oliver's account of his research travels
throughout tropical Africa from the 1940s to the 1980s; his efforts
to train and foster African graduate students to teach in African
universities; his role in establishing conferences and journals to
bring together the work of historians and archaeologists from
Europe and Africa; his encounters with political and religious
leaders, scholars, soldiers, and storytellers; and the political
and economic upheavals of the continent that he witnessed.
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