The Power of Doubt: Essays in Honor of David Henige

Edited by Paul S. Landau

In his introduction to the Festschrift honoring historian and African Studies bibliographer David Henige, editor Paul S. Landau writes that “the open-endedness of the formulation, The Power of Doubt, is deliberate, and has always been central to David Henige’s notion of practicing history. One does not know where one is going to end up, if one is really honest in doing research. Not long ago most Africanist historians used not to suppose that their primary concern lay in turning out a product. They were instead desirous to uncover and demonstrate hypotheses about the past, with evidence from the past, when and where this was possible. The separation of expert knowledge and ecrits of quality from popular accounts of the past is central to the progressivism of academic pioneers such as Henige; the massification of half-knowledge in popular culture (anywhere: here or in Africa) was to be denied history’s status. It is possible to get the past right.”

Through his critical examination of oral traditions, Henige “insisted on something scholars should by now all recognize, that history is not sealed and preserved in oral traditions like a package….The lessening of our expectation of historicity in oral transmissions meant, above all, that we needed to know as much as possible about the internal dynamics of the societies that perpetuated and reproduced oral traditions we collected or studied.”

Emmanuel Akyeampong, Professor of History and African and African American Studies at Harvard University, writes, “This Festschrift captures the intellectual spirit at the heart of David Henige’s scholarship over the past four decades: a rigorous examination of evidence (oral and written) and the development of a “good practice” [in engaging] the critical processes by which we know what we know, or conclude that we cannot really know….The essays in The Power of Doubt—on European accounts of indigenous warfare in late nineteenth-century East Africa, European explorers and their Luso-African guides, oral traditions juxtaposed with written accounts of Kongo’s history, and paradigmatic shifts when indigenous anthropologists conduct fieldwork in Mali [inter alia]—reflect the expanse of Henige’s scholarly engagements, which also transcended Africa. Prefaced by Paul Landau’s thoughtful introduction and commentary on Henige’s philosophy of knowledge, the essays underscore Henige’s abiding commitment to evidence over theory, his comfort with the messiness of the past, and his unswerving espousal of the historian’s mandate.”

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