An Vansina’s Methodology on Oral Tradition

Bona fide historical sources can be divided into two straightforward categories: written and oral. Written sources have always been more “consumed” by bookworms because whatever authentically, dated written documents can be re-interpreted by historians from exactly when they were written. Oral sources, on the other hand, lack an exact chronology. To even consider the amount of possible deviations which can occur over a single generation, implies that oral sources are slightly more capricious historical sources. Oral sources, usually bequeathed to ensuing generations by word-of-mouth, demonstrate that history has been put into consideration because an event, in conjunction with a person or an event, is re-told in the present. Obviously written sources are better than their oral equivalent, but the African interior did not yield many written sources until the 19th century. Jan Vansina, however, supports the legitimacy of oral sources as a form of historical evidence and has adopted oral traditions to reconstruct the African past for fifty years. This paper, therefore, chronologically explores some of Jan Vansina’s major publications and discusses the methodological approaches he established to apply oral sources in the reconstruction of the African past. To do so, this paper constantly considers the transformations within the field of African history from the late 1940’s to the present.
The years 1947-48 yielded many new discoveries related to the study of African History. For the first time, new schools and institutes, devoutly focused on African studies, were rapidly appearing in Western Europe. For example, 1947 brought about the Institut de la Reserche Scientific en Afrique Centrale (IRSAC), at the Terveuren Museum, in Belgium and 1948 saw the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) extend the geographical coverage of its history department from Asia to Africa. Classes devoted to African Studies also began to be included in academic curriculums in Africa

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