The School

The Wisconsin school of African history is a set of intellectual and methodological approaches that, over some six decades, contributed to significant developments in the broader field.¹ Several of the dozen or so faculty, and more than a hundred PhD graduates of the African History program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, have also been individually prominent among recipients of widely recognized fellowships, honors, and professional offices, but grouping them as a “school” leads beyond these personal distinctions to their collective distinguishing influences on the overarching trajectory of the field.² Their goal is bringing Africa’s past in from its origins beyond the fringe of the historical discipline to its current (2018) growing acceptance by colleagues in the older, conventional fields of European and United States history.³

Founders

Philip D. Curtin, originally a historian of British imperialism with an emphasis on the 19th-century West Indies, caught the initial wave of African history as it broke over the historical profession in the 1950s. Curtin had come to Wisconsin in 1956 and was asked also to teach Latin American history.⁴ Recognizing the relevance of the African context of Britain’s modern history, he had arranged extensive travels on the continent and began work on the intellectual history that became The Image of Africa.⁵ Deepening his engagement with Africa, he joined the US African Studies Association in 1958, affiliating with the founding fellows of the preceding year. As national independence gained momentum throughout the sub-Saharan portions of the continent, peaking with the emergence of seventeen new nations in the momentous year of 1960, he soon became a consultant to the national foundations supporting the proliferation of so-called area studies in the United States. At Wisconsin, he added Africa to the range of history doctoral fields offered in the momentous year of independence, and international respectability, in Africa.

From nearly the beginning, the African history degree at Wisconsin was closely coordinated with an interdisciplinary African studies program—a (“Title VI”) National Resource Center for Africa, funded under the 1958 National Defense Education Act and administered by the (then) US Department of Health, Education and Welfare—with Curtin as first director. In history, he recruited Jan Vansina, who arrived in late 1960, bringing training in medieval history (Catholic University of Leuven, in Belgium), several years (1952 to 1960) of experience as a researcher in Ruanda-Urundi and the Belgian Congo for the then-new Belgian government Institute of Scientific Research in Central Africa (Institute pour la Recherche Scientifique en Afrique Centrale, IRSAC), formal study of anthropology at University College London, and an audacious Leuven doctoral dissertation laying out a formal method for critiquing African oral traditions as sources for their tellers’ unwritten pasts.⁶

To establish a place for Africa in Madison’s large department, with over seven hundred graduate students dedicated to the histories of United States and Europe that then constituted the discipline, Curtin adopted a strategy anticipating what James C. Scott, in other contexts, later labeled “weapons of the weak.” With Carnegie Corporation funding, he expanded the department’s faculty in Latin America and added positions in Southeast Asia, the Islamic World, and South Asia (or “India” as it then was). Accepting the negatively defined grouping of these “non-western” fields as marginal to the respectable streams of the discipline, in 1959 he clustered them under a positive designation as a Program in Comparative Tropical History. The first class of graduate students arrived in 1960, other students already enrolled in conventional fields converted, and Comparative Tropical History became a recognized caucus (and examination field) in Wisconsin’s Department of History. It did not take the students in the subject long to exult in the inevitable nickname accorded their alliance: “Comp Swamp.”

The epistemology of the program, however, was serious and substantial. It adapted the then-dynamic and disruptive field of “social history,” devoted to rescuing the seemingly inarticulate—French and English villagers, Mexican peasants, and potentially also Africans and others in the low latitudes—from the oblivion assigned them by the prevailing disciplinary reliance on the written words of great men, about great ideas, religious and secular, high politics, and grand wars. Africa became provocatively notorious among all these deserving “people without history” when Hugh Trevor-Roper, one of the United Kingdom’s most eminent scholars in the discipline, with consummate timing mobilized aspiring historians of Africa with his acerbic assertion that “Perhaps in the future, there will be some African history to teach. But, at present there is none: there is only the history of the Europeans in Africa. The rest is darkness . . . [otherwise there were only] the unedifying gyrations of barbarous tribes in picturesque but irrelevant corners of the globe.”⁷ Even without Trevor-Roper’s unintending call to arms, a palpable and energizing sense of social activism, a mission, permeated this founding generation’s dedication to recovering their past to prepare Africa’s new nations for the bright future promised by their release from colonial constraints. This initial nationalist phase of African historiography, ironically, extended the early 20th-century devotion of the discipline to the histories of European and American nations. The field is only now recovering from some of the ramifications of this implicitly euro-centric launch.

Training in the comparative history program centered on a graduate seminar, taught every semester, first by Curtin and then by a rotating sequence of the new faculty from the other peripheries. It met university minimums for enrollments by assembling the initially small cohorts of students in each of the participating fields in instructionally viable numbers. It departed from the standard format featuring student research for their theses to frame its members’ personal interests in contexts far beyond their own regional fields, often to revelatory effect. Intellectually, the connections among the geographically dispersed equatorial regions were meant to emerge from a methodology comparing recurring and seemingly similar historical phenomena formulated as sociological abstractions; these “models” usually involved such largely still-anonymous aggregates as “slaves” or “millennial movements.” Most of these topics of the tropics offered an intriguing air of exoticism to the historical discipline’s liberal northern-hemispheric mind at the time: slavery, “cross-cultural trade” and trading diaspora, state-formation, “trans-frontiersmen,” “plural societies,” “secondary empires,” mass migrations, and more. These phenomena tended to converge with the main fields of the discipline by focusing on interactions between the West and the Rest and by extending to the historical hallmarks of the era, revolutions, revolts, and nationalist movements.⁸

The primary historical aspect of the seminar’s comparative social-science logic lay in probing the diverse specific contexts in which the events classed as similar had turned up in what subsequently came to be termed the “Global South.” Students in the seminar learned to think in context-transcending scales, on reasonably informed empirical foundations, that also sensitized them to the broader patterns of historical change later elaborated as “world history.” In African history, large entering classes of graduate students—as many as twelve to fifteen in the peak years after 1965—supported more conventional research seminars leading students into the emerging intricacies of the sources for the field. Although the program had begun by taking captive the existing exclusion of the “tropics” from conventional history’s purview, the vitality of its approach soon attracted participants from the mainstream fields and was redefined, more inclusively, in 1973 as “Comparative World History.”

Comparative tropical history at Wisconsin also joined the simultaneous opening of the conventional fields of the West to the histories of “the Rest.” William McNeill, at the University of Chicago, in 1965 had challenged the prevailing introduction to “history” in US higher-education as axiomatically “western civilization” by problematizing The Rise of the West.⁹ With barely implicit irony, McNeill presented Europe as a small, parochial peninsula, peripheral to dynamic older Asian and Islamic worlds, which derived key innovations in its “rise” from those “non-western” sources. The book became the basic text for Curtin’s popular undergraduate (and graduate) course in Comparative Tropical History, featuring lectures on the phenomena being compared in the graduate seminar.

Curtin joined the initial leaders in a growing national movement then elevating the conventional secondary-school course in “world history,” scorned in higher education circles as merely a “teaching field,” to the level of sustained scholarly research, prominently including Africa. The graduate students in the seminar were not encouraged to undertake individual research on this dauntingly soaring scale, but several went on to build their own versions of “comparative tropical history” into the professionalization of world history in the later 1970s. They and others reunited and recruited in panels presented at the annual meetings of the American Historical Association and, in 1982, eventually formed a complementing World History Association.¹⁰

Wisconsin Africanists prominent among this founding generation of world historians included Ross E. Dunn and Patrick Manning (both earned PhDs in 1969).¹¹ They and visionary colleagues from other institutional bases, including teachers in the schools, went on to bring world history to its current centrality in the discipline’s epistemological accent on contextualizing local events in global patterns.¹² For the first cohorts of the Wisconsin school, Curtin’s anchoring of African history in a comparative framework created an impetus to embed Africa’s past in broader processes of historical change, worldwide. As Curtin was acutely aware, world history was a means to reduce the lingering exoticism of history in Africa. A globally inclusive intellectual framework inherently begged the presence of Africa, particularly in the United States, where African Americans were then establishing historical and political places of their own. World history also underwrote the professional growth of the field by allowing even small college history departments to consider Africanists to teach the majority of the human past beyond the required histories of the United States and Europe.

A Building Generation

Allen Isaacman (PhD 1970) won the Herskovits Prize of the African Studies Association (1972) in this vein by using the comparative concept of “transfrontiersmen” to interpret the prazo estate holders in the Zambezi Valley, originally Portuguese women (owing to a particularity of medieval Portuguese land tenure laws), whose 17th- and 18th-century successors integrated themselves thoroughly into the African contexts where they lived.¹³ The recognition that Africans had converted the Catholics who had, at least nominally, gone to the Zambezi Valley to convert the “natives” reversed the then-presumed dynamics of the encounter to feature initiatives, even attractions, on the side of the Africans. Other early graduates hurdled the barrier of Africa’s seeming exoticism by drawing similarly on the geographical mobility of sociological concepts, which also framed histories in Africa in terms recognizable to departmental colleagues even in conventional fields.¹⁴ Patrick Manning normalized Africans’ histories of mobility by devoting several decades to studying human migrations around the world, eventually even to the movements of primordial human linguistic communities “out of Africa,” some seventy thousand years ago.¹⁵

Meanwhile Vansina was complementing these modern paradigms from the social sciences with African epistemologies based on close examination of evidence of their own ideas and actions. Vansina’s rigorous applications of the methods of several disciplines ancillary to the document-based history axiomatic at the time, though initially classed only negatively as “unwritten,” became the standards of the entire discipline of African history, particularly for its earlier eras. The richness of Vansina’s lengthy research experience in Belgian Africa, academic training in anthropology, practical fieldwork in recovery archaeology, and familiarity with linguistics (enhanced by fluency in multiple Bantu languages), as well as his calling-card “oral traditions,” introduced students at Wisconsin to a methodological array accessing, and critical perspective on, the earlier centuries of Africa’s past. (One observer wryly qualified this multiplicity of methods as the “decathlon of the social sciences.”)¹⁶ Beyond methodological versatility, with students at least as informed consumers, Vansina’s imprint on the Wisconsin school also extended his own illumination of “darkest” central Africa to the earlier—indeed earliest accessible—centuries of its Francophone and Lusophone areas.¹⁷ A distinguishing feature of Vansina’s disciplinary agility was his unwavering domestication of the potentially distracting technicalities peculiar to the ancillary disciplines to yield historical insights into the subjects of whatever region he ventured into.¹⁸ Methodological finesse never distracted from his devotion to the epistemology of history. So revelatory and enabling were his methods that specialists in the discipline’s other regional fields, including Europe and the Native Americas, adapted them to their own needs. Africa, in Vansina’s wake, transformed the discipline.

With this multidisciplinary background, Vansina joined Curtin in in 1964 in launching a Department of African Languages and Literature, the only such program in United States universities with full departmental status.¹⁹ They saw Africa’s languages and its modern literatures as necessary humanistic avenues to research properly couched in the ontologies of Africans rather than in inappropriate projections of modern conceptualizations. The departmental framework gave Africanists control of the languages taught under the auspices of the NDEA National Defense Foreign Languages (initially Zulu, Swahili, and Hausa), expanded to include African literatures in European languages well before conventional departments of French and English (or Portuguese) took seriously the growing corpus of modern writing from Africa.²⁰ One of the Wisconsin graduates, H. Leroy Vail (b. 1940–d. 1999), took his PhD in this department (1972) with a dissertation on Tumbuka (Malawi) grammar and later collaborated with poet and critic Landeg White in landmark integrations of history, linguistics, literary insight, and political economy in central and southern Africa.²¹ The department underscored Wisconsin’s commitment to the centrality of fieldwork, conducted in relevant African languages, in understanding Africans’ pasts. Wisconsin Africanist historians routinely engaged colleagues in this strong and distinctive program, to the benefit of parties on all sides.

The interdisciplinary framing of African history at Wisconsin flowered further in 1969 with the arrival of Steven Feierman, who had added an Oxford DPhil in anthropology to his training at Northwestern in history. Feierman’s intensive research in Tanzania exemplified Madison’s approach and also extended to eastern Africa Wisconsin’s regional coverage of the continent, then the customary method of dividing the field for purposes of instruction. By the early 1970s, African history was maturing beyond the founding wave of single-volume continental-scaled texts in the 1960s to seem to require multi-authored compendia divided along these regional lines. The three Wisconsin historians combined their perspectives in a text representing the formative years of the Wisconsin school of understanding: African History, with Leonard Thompson (UCLA, and by then at Yale) contributing the chapters on southern Africa.²² The authors had intended to include a fifth colleague to write the text on North Africa, but the region eventually fell to Curtin, owing to difficulties in locating a specialist on Mediterranean Africa sufficiently familiar with sub-Saharan zones to meet the Wisconsin school’s vision of a continent deeply embedded in larger world-historical contexts and to Curtin’s focus on western Africa and its deep connections to the north.²³ Including northern Africa, beyond ignoring western and northeastern Africa’s deep historical contacts with adjacent ancient and Islamic areas, also muted potential political overtones of racialization and exoticization implicit in isolating the continent’s sub-Saharan regions.

A tension had existed, from the start of Africa’s belated admittance into the historical discipline, between emphasizing its global contexts—especially the intensity of its commercial contacts with growing Atlantic capitalism—and understanding the uniqueness of African historical processes as local and regional variations on global historical themes.²⁴ The field’s distinctive methodologies made its past appear exceptional, thus working against its integration into the familiar Eurocentric frameworks of the discipline. Awareness of Africa’s engagement in world-historical patterns became a prominent theme in the formation of the Wisconsin school, led by Curtin’s orientation toward Atlantic themes well before “Atlantic history” developed the definition and productivity that it acquired in the 2000s. The slave trade to the Americas was the obvious focus, and Curtin had engaged it first in an edited compilation of a dozen known narratives by survivors, with prefaces written by specialists in the African background of each.²⁵ The biographical window on individuals’ lives also struck a resonantly historical chord among social historians otherwise resigned to discerning captives only in anonymous aggregates.²⁶

In the Wisconsin spirit of interdisciplinary inquiry, Curtin was also working on what became his major monograph on Africa, an economic history and anthropology of the continent’s far-western Senegambian regions between the 16th and early 19th centuries, when trader communities and political authorities there were engaging the growing Atlantic trade.²⁷ Those decades had been treated primarily in terms of the captives whom European traders bought as slaves. Rather than contextualizing Africa in this conventional European “triangular trade,” Curtin contextualized the people condemned to slavery and the warriors and traders who condemned them in far-western Africa’s much larger and more complex regional economy. The region’s full economic history revealed the relatively limited prominence of the people commodified as slaves. To match his contextualization on the African side with its Atlantic complement, originally subordinated in a footnote, Curtin checked standard sources on the maritime Atlantic trade to find the accepted total numbers of captives sent off to enslavement in the Americas. The good news, as it turned out, was that no such consensus (or even an authoritative source) existed; he tracked down only a range of guesses differing by nearly two orders of magnitude, from only a few million to over one hundred million.

With Curtin’s curiosity piqued, but lacking even a preliminary sense for the documentable proportions of this trade in human beings—and working only from published materials available in Madison in an era before the Internet—he wove together these scattered quantitative indicators to write The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census, a book that transformed Atlantic, European imperial, and—most profoundly—African history.²⁸ In it Curtin was able to count and estimate patterns of captives arriving in all American colonies (and eventually nations), who totaled some 10.5 million Africans landed alive, with an estimated error range of +/-20 percent. To reach a similarly controlled estimate of Africa’s even less directly documented demographic losses through the trade (in terms of schematized portions of the continent’s coastline), he made a derivative calculation by augmenting the numbers for American arrivals by an estimated average loss to mortality during the Middle Passage.

For historians familiar with W. E. B. DuBois’s somewhat offhand (1915) speculations on these (and other) numbers of the captive people taken out of Africa, widely (though not carefully) reported as an iconic hundred million, Curtin’s numbers were suspiciously low, if not also somehow demeaning of the enormity of the human suffering that the trade entailed.²⁹ This collision of ethics and economics, a manifestation of the inherent dialogue of the deaf between human morality and the “dismal science,” echoed for decades through debates, sometimes approaching rancorous proportions, on the trade’s true magnitude. Here is not the place to trace the more productive consequences of these intense critiques, as Curtin moved on. However, David Eltis and dozens of other researchers dug into the primary sources on four continents. These were sources Curtin had not intended to consult, but these archives eventually yielded details on more than thirty-five thousand individual ships’ voyages, presented in an Internet database that made the raw data accessible to the public.³⁰ Among the Wisconsin school, Paul Lovejoy became the monitor of the African components of the “numbers game” swirling in the wake of Curtin’s Census in a series of articles refining the estimates of embarkations that Curtin’s method had left a secondary estimation.

The animated 1960s initial burst of political history in Africa had featured both the politics of Africa’s new nations and also of supposed “kingdoms,” and even empires, in the continent’s earlier centuries.³¹ As this wave crested, the students of the founding generation began to sketch other layers of context in Africa’s past. In Madison, Curtin added a further discipline to the Wisconsin school’s assortment of methodological tools by expanding on its formal economic aspects. Economics in Africa had been almost invisible in the 1960s, a hostage to a lingering colonial-era presumption that people in Africa, whom colonial governments and companies had been mercilessly forcing to undertake tedious, even dangerous, and scandalously under-compensated labor, were “non-economic men” who did not understand modern money and so would not have responded to wages at market-driven levels. Few of the first historians interested in Africa were trained in economics, and trained economists had seemingly more promising areas of the world in which to test their field’s universalist models of the market. But by 1970, as world prices for Africa’s commodity exports fell and foreign investment declined in the military regimes that were replacing civilian republics, the political radiance of nationalist triumph was fading into rather dimmer economic realities. From the shadows of Andre Gunder Frank’s work on The Development of Underdevelopment in Latin America, activist historians of Africa inverted the prevailing “trade and politics” paradigm, which had celebrated the political consolidation that Africans had appeared to have built out of rather ill-defined exchanges with the world economy: rather, as Walter Rodney’s iconic statement of the case for Africa charged, the question was How Europe Underdeveloped Africa.³²

All but simultaneously, Curtin’s research for his economic history/anthropology of Senegambia had put him in touch with a generation of young historians determined to understand Africa’s past through the framework of conventional liberal market economics. He collaborated with an agricultural economic historian at Wisconsin named Marvin Miracle, who was working on Africa, to win a Ford Foundation grant to create a Wisconsin Research Program in African Economic History.³³ Curtin planned this new initiative as comprehensively as he had laid out the strategy for consolidating Comparative Tropical History, launching an international association at a 1971 conference in Accra, Ghana, with additional support for individual research, as well as a scholarly journal, African Economic History, based in Wisconsin’s African Studies Program.³⁴ A cohort of Wisconsin history graduate students thrived under these auspices and went on to lead the succeeding broad incorporation of economic considerations into Africa’s history.³⁵

As counterparts in Europe, many of them academic exiles from apartheid-constricted South Africa, embraced more theoretical aspects of neo-Marxian political economy, the epistemological question in Madison was how historians might apply liberal economic generic models without abandoning Africa’s historical specificities: material wealth in many places circulated more as tokens of personal esteem, respect, or obligation than serving as units of abstract value, independent of their givers or receivers. Circulating people in Africa, in effect, did not conform to the economic discipline’s presumed universality but which, in fact, reflected only aspects of more commercialized and monetized market economies. Even the relatively commercialized sectors of desert-edge western Africa, and—later—coastal areas’ exchanges with the Atlantic economy, were arguably limited sectors embedded in complementing “domestic” economies worth understanding on their own human terms. Curtin’s Pre-Colonial Trade turned to economic anthropology to combine these two aspects, and Lovejoy, in particular, pursued this institutional vein of economic history with regard to extensions of desert-edge Islamic economic sectors.³⁶

The ticking time-bomb of the history of slavery, particularly in the Americas, exploded in the late 1960s, at a moment (1967–1968 and 1969–1970) when Suzanne Miers (b. 1922–d. 2016) was visiting the program as an instructor. Along with Wisconsin Africanists, Miers went on to co-edit a series of volumes of collected essays that introduced people enslaved in Africa into the history of a continent where slavery had been difficult to discern in the glare of the racialized American formulation of the status, in which only whites enslaved only blacks. It had not seemed conceivable that people in Africa, implicitly still seen as “blacks,” could have enslaved other “blacks” there. It took courage to penetrate this fraught illusion, as sensitive in the contexts of Africa’s new nations’ dedication to liberal equality as it was in the racially divided Americas.

Miers first joined anthropologist Igor Kopytoff to bring out what proved to have been the ubiquity of slaves in Africa’s past.³⁷ She then brought her prior training in 19th-century international anti-slavery to bear on the sequels to this heritage, collaborating with Richard Roberts (a former Madison undergraduate) to edit the ironically titled End of Slavery in Africa, and then, with Martin A. Klein, to move on to the succeeding years of Slavery and Colonial Rule in Africa.³⁸ Claire Robertson, a 1974 graduate of the program, co-edited (also with Martin A. Klein) a no-less path-breaking recognition that the majority of the people enslaved in Africa had been females.³⁹ As slaves became recognized as a principal presence in political economies in Africa eventually understood, in an equivalent phrasing, as based on “wealth in people”, Patrick Manning, working in a demographic and statistical vein derived from his distinguishing earlier training in economics, developed a complex model of Africa’s possible population losses owing to its exports of captives, not only to the Atlantic trade but also eastern Africa’s losses to the Indian Ocean and the costs to sudanic populations in the trade north across the Sahara Desert to Mediterranean Africa and beyond.⁴⁰

Some graduates of the program combined Vansina’s insights into the internal dynamics of African historical processes and Curtin’s stress on broader contexts to explore their implications for slaveries in Africa, as well as the export trades in captives. Lovejoy, beyond his refinements of exports of captives sent into the Atlantic, described the 19th-century Sokoto Caliphate (now northern Nigeria), his primary research field, in comparative terms, estimating the vast scale of the slave-staffed agriculture there as similar to that of the better-known “plantations” in the New World.⁴¹ He continued on to elucidate numerous legal, commercial, demographic, and other aspects of the raiding in western Africa that spread widely to produce these captives, as well as others sent north across the Sahara and still others sold off to the south, where some became slaves in the Atlantic trade.⁴²

To develop this expansive vision, Lovejoy created a vast and very productive international scholarly network based in a center at York University (Toronto) for the study of what he initially termed a capacious “Nigerian hinterland.”⁴³ In the 2000s, this evolving team of collaborators from four continents became the largest, most intellectually diverse, and consistently innovative extension of the Wisconsin school’s integration of Africa in Atlantic and world histories. In a “career-spanning synthesis” he set the West African jihads that gave birth to the Sokoto caliphate in a conventional historical staple, the Atlantic “age of revolutions.” He also set the slaves in Sokoto into the context of 19th-century resurgence of the “second slavery” in the Americas, added West African Islamic clerics’ opposition to selling captive Muslims to infidel Christians to the European abolition movement, and explored the histories of enslaved West Africans in the Americas as evidence for the turmoil in Africa that produced them.⁴⁴ Lovejoy’s Africa was integral to the modern history of the world.

The writer’s dissertation (1972) attempted to complement the Comparative Tropical History program’s intellectual premise of applying sociological abstractions—plantations, diasporas, or in this instance “states”—

with Africans’ understandings of politics in the background of a trading regime in Angola that later became the principal source of the captives whom Portuguese in Luanda sent to Brazil as slaves. Working from central African motivations built around a strongly collective “political economy of people,” the approach probed the dynamics of how the various African parties engaged the contrasting Atlantic world of commercial wealth, turning trade goods they obtained on credit into personal gains in the human form of dependent followers. The credit that enabled these gains left indebtedness that led to the familiar tragic consequences of seizures of debtors’ whole families and sales of them as slaves, destruction of their communities, and widespread suffering and death.⁴⁵ The context of African indebtedness to Atlantic merchant capitalism added financial considerations to the Wisconsin school’s accent on African political and economic dynamics.⁴⁶ Reversing the vector of setting Vansina’s focus on Africans’ historical strategies in Curtin’s world-historical contexts, African sensibilities to community could also be seen to manifest themselves in captives’ creative initiatives to reconstruct viable social worlds in slavery in Brazil, despite renewed isolation through repeated sales.⁴⁷ This approach enriched Atlantic historical contexts with Africans’ perspectives.

Robert Harms (PhD 1978) combined Atlantic slaving with insight into African dynamics afloat in other registers, first with a history of 19th century Bobangi slave traders on the middle Zaire River, and then followed by the sequence of local contexts along the course of a French slaver’s 1731 voyage from Vannes, in Brittany, to Ouidah and then to Martinique.⁴⁸ On the other side of the continent, Janet Ewald (PhD 1982) moved toward parallel integrations of Africans in the major currents of world history since about 1700, first from the perspective of the Nuba Hills west of the upper Nile and subsequently integrating eastern African economies into the commercial circuits of the northern and southern Indian Ocean, with emphasis on the historical dynamics of borrowed South Asian capital.⁴⁹ Wisconsin’s distinctive dialectic of anchoring historical actors’ motivations locally and then setting their actions in expanding spheres of context has proved productive for history in Africa; this dialectic has also begun to enrich the histories of the other world regions in which Africans have long been engaged.

The Wisconsin school’s emphasis on integrating Africa into the broader discipline of history proceeded also on the professional level. Curtin served as president of the American Historical Association in 1983 but addressed his predominantly Americanist and Europeanist constituents as a world historian, rather than as an Africanist; his restraint would have been prudent at the time. When the Association implemented a triennial policy of rotating candidates for its presidency through the two main fields, the United States and Europe, with the third slot allocated to a sub-rotation among the residual world regions, including Africa, the office fell to Miller when Africa’s turn came in 1996. He took advantage of the significant maturation of Africa’s historiography by then to attempt to bridge the gap between the association’s tiny minority of Africanists and its great US and European majorities, addressing them on “Africa and History/History and Africa.”⁵⁰ Manning produced a steady drumbeat of Africa-paced interventions in the World History Association’s several online publications and published a sweeping view from Africa on The African Diaspora: A History Through Culture.⁵¹ When Manning took an Africanist turn as president of the AHA in 2016, he featured historians of Africa in other aspects of the association’s programming.⁵²

Vansina’s emphasis on methodologies and historical integrity, enriched by Feierman’s proficiency in social theory, became the hallmark of the program in the 1970s, particularly as Curtin’s expansive vision faded locally after 1975, when he departed for Johns Hopkins University. Feierman’s first book, The Shambaa Kingdom (modern Tanzania), historicized “kingdoms,” the venerable staple of African history’s first decade, then seen largely in terms of structurally static European models of monarchy.⁵³ He depicted the complexity and fluidity that in fact marked early African political systems and explored the correspondingly flexible patterns of the oral performances interpreting their histories.⁵⁴ Feierman’s acute ability to sense and articulate African thought matured through his years in Madison to elaborate the distinctive sophistication of the Shambaa discourse of politics, defying his title’s ironic reference to clichéd “peasant” intellectuals.⁵⁵ His graduate students have been distinguished by their alertness to the African historical worlds they have entered and for the diversity of the proliferating subfields of African history they have led: cultural studies, environmental history, medical history, women’s/gender history, and public policy from Guinée (Conakry) and Ghana in western Africa through varied parts of eastern Africa to Zimbabwe and South Africa.⁵⁶

Consolidating

William Allen Brown (b. 1934–d. 2007), a Wisconsin PhD (1969) who was recalled to Madison in 1975 from Yale and Harvard, joined Feierman and Vansina to assume primary responsibility for researching western Africa—the large region that Curtin’s departure had left open—and to expand the program’s coverage of Islam.⁵⁷ From Brown’s graduate-school days in Madison he had been a respected informal adviser to his fellow students, providing knowledgeable and sensitive guidance particularly to sudanic regions, and he resumed this mentoring role when he returned.⁵⁸ In the same year, another recent graduate of the program, David P. Henige (PhD 1973), returned to join the university’s Memorial Library as Africana bibliographer. He expanded Vansina’s dedication to methods with a ferocious attention to detail and acerbic dedication to rigorous critiques of sources in all their forms, not least the hazards lurking in oral narratives. A crusader in the cause of method, he single-handedly created, edited, typed, and distributed the first issues of History in Africa: A Journal of Method (vol. 1, 1974, still appearing, with vol. 45 for 2018).⁵⁹ The journal added impetus to African historians’ growing wariness of earlier amateur writers’ naïve handling of the European written sources for Africa’s earlier centuries, not fully corrected by the first wave of trained researchers. (Many of these first-wave professionals had been eager to make whatever use they could of whatever documentation they could find of the “continent without a history.”) Though Henige never taught a class at Wisconsin, he became an expert and attentive guide to generations of graduate students, in Africa and other fields, “opening up new vistas by dint of mining for new evidence rather than being content to adopt new theories.”⁶⁰ He found an eager and able co-conspirator in Vansina, who contributed more than two dozen characteristically penetrating (and often dryly witty) reflections on historical method and its ironies to the journal, with methodological implications far wider for history then only Africa. Students thrived on the Wisconsin school’s catalytic combination of imaginative conceptualization and methodological precision.

Thomas Spear had advanced this productive combination in a veritable handbook to the Wisconsin school, dedicated to Kenya’s Past in tribute to the country where his African mentors, no longer implicitly diminished as “informants,” had guided him in his initial fieldwork.⁶¹ He then pursued the linguistic component of the Madison historical toolkit, collaborating with (linguist) Derek Nurse to explore The Swahili: Reconstructing the History and Language of an African Society, 800-1500.⁶² Spear’s attention to method never faltered as he moved on to monographs on Kenya’s diverse regions, principally among components of the communities ethnographically oversimplified as “Maasai.” David Newbury (PhD 1979), ventured into Rwanda, the site of Vansina’s original fieldwork, and further probed the intellectual history of oral traditions with a series of essays regarded as exemplary methodological explorations, as well as bringing historical accuracy to paradigmatically distorted tribalizations of that country’s genocidal violence.⁶³ Paul Landau similarly integrated Africans’ political legacy into recent politics in South Africa.⁶⁴The women among the graduating Wisconsin cohorts of the early 1970s became pioneers in infusing the history of Africa with gender as “a useful category of historical analysis,” as recognition of this belatedly obvious fact surged through every field of history.⁶⁵ Margaret Jean Hay (PhD 1972), Iris Berger (PhD 1973), and Claire Robertson (PhD 1974) crafted foundational works.⁶⁶ In a succeeding generation, Elizabeth Schmidt traced colonized African women’s key contributions to protests, strikes, and nationalist movements, and Nancy Rose Hunt (PhD 1992) combined Feierman’s growing interests in medical history with Vansina’s experience in the Belgian Congo to write a series of cultural histories centered on women, medicalization, childbearing, breastfeeding, and other contested aspects of being colonized while female in equatorial Africa.⁶⁷

The Wisconsin school’s graduates thus contributed to the great growth spurt in African history in the later 1960s, and those taking their degrees in the 1970s often led the original, largely political field’s ramification into its component subject subfields and theoretical perspectives that reflected its growing engagement with the broader historical discipline: The preceding initial Wisconsin cohort of the early 1960s had taken on relatively independent topics, adding more isolated islands of insight to the scattered scenes then only beginning to dot Africa’s earlier past. To the degree that they represented a coherent school, they probed Vansina’s interests in earlier eras and oral traditions.⁶⁸

The surge of graduates in the later 1960s and 1970s had found themselves at the right place at the right time; and guided by alert and versatile mentoring, they comprised the early Wisconsin school.⁶⁹ They also secured positions at major research universities, then diversifying their history curricula to include Africa, several of them in other Title VI Africa Resource Programs. That early cohort thus found institutional support that afforded time and funding for research leading to the trend-setting publications that they produced.

A Maturing Field

The PhDs of the 1980s, still under Vansina’s and Feierman’s mentorship and supported by Henige and Brown, continued in the styles of their predecessors but took on greater instructional responsibilities as they followed the growing field into regional universities and smaller colleges. Several, still in larger university settings, published significant monographs, some of them contributing to the launch of Allen Isaacman’s prestigious Social History of Africa series with Heinemann.⁷⁰ With fewer students in succeeding classes, the program’s research seminars—always the core of graduate instruction in Madison—grew smaller and less defined by subjects than by the diverse research interests of individual students. These students moved alertly into the trending topics and approaches in the by-then robust and diversified field of history in Africa.

They also maintained an activist commitment to Africa that had run through the program since returnees from the Peace Corps, missionary families, and other service experiences on the continent had enrolled in the mid-1960s. Vansina was a dedicated mentor for students from African backgrounds, including many not at Wisconsin but working at institutions in Africa under his remote guidance in energetically mistyped missives. A steady stream of others arrived in Madison from Africa, most returning to their home countries to make contributions to universities there, with several of them rising to distinction in national administrative and diplomatic capacities.⁷¹

Activist Wisconsin Africanists in the United States applied their academic knowledge to the causes of liberation movements in southern Africa in the 1970s and to the anti-apartheid boycotts intensifying in the 1980s. Allen and Barbara Isaacman, in particular, were dedicated contributors to reconstructing independent Mozambique in the wake of the assumption of power there by FRELIMO (Frente da Libertação de Moçambique, the colony’s principal and eventually winning liberation movement) after the Portuguese withdrew in 1974. They also built social activism, later extended to post-apartheid South Africa, into a productive MacArthur Center (now the Interdisciplinary Center for the Study of Global Change) at the University of Minnesota, with a strong emphasis on training students from the continent.⁷² David Newbury, and Catharine Newbury, beyond their historical contextualizations of the wars in and around Rwanda, became prominent anti-genocide activists. Lovejoy’s network, based in Toronto, participated actively in the UNESCO Slave Route Project.”⁷³ Lovejoy renamed the York University center in honor of Harriett Tubman to memorialize Canada’s role as a promised land for travelers fleeing slavery in the United States on the Underground Railroad and recruited collaborators and students from the diaspora as well as from Africa. Sandra Barnes, a historically trained Wisconsin anthropologist (PhD 1974), created an Africa Humanities Program at the American Council of Learned Societies, an ACLS-administered, Carnegie Corporation-funded fellowship program for faculty at universities in anglophone nations in Africa. As Africa moved further into the main currents of the historical discipline, Meredith Terretta (PhD 2004) combined human rights activism with scholarship contributing to moving global history beyond the fraying paradigm of the nation-state that the founding cohorts of Africanists had celebrated in the 1960s.⁷⁴

Tom Spear returned from teaching at Williams College to join his predecessors in Madison in 1993, after Feierman had moved on in 1990 to lead the African studies program at the University of Florida and Vansina retired in 1994.⁷⁵ Although the numbers of graduates in Madison studying the history of Africa continued to decline in response to diminishing national availability of teaching positions in the field, Spear, Henige, and Brown—with Vansina always available—maintained the program’s innovative spirit. Florence Bernault, a francophone central Africanist like Vansina, joined them in 1996, bringing a background in Africanist circles in Paris that contributed to keeping Wisconsin’s training current in theorizations of culture. Her research and teaching on colonial-era injustices also fed into the program’s activist stream.

Bernault and Spear trained graduate students especially in modern African religious and intellectual history, an updated version of the Wisconsin focus on African understandings of, and political responses to, the colonial presence of the 20th century.⁷⁶ Spear also provided steady leadership in consolidating Africa’s position in the university, almost immediately assuming direction of the African Studies Program (1995–1998) and, after a term as an editor of the Journal of African History, chairing the Department of History from 2001 to 2003. He became the first Africanist to hold departmental office, marking Africa’s full integration as a keystone of the department’s international repute. He also restored the distinction of the University of Wisconsin Press as a publisher of significant scholarship on Africa, editing (with Madison colleagues in other departments) an ongoing series of monographs on Africa and the Diaspora: History, Politics, Culture.⁷⁷

Continuities and Change

After Spear retired in 2004, Neil Kodesh (Northwestern) and James Sweet (CUNY), both of them students of graduates of the Wisconsin school, joined the faculty of history in 2005. Kodesh’s interests in medical history, historical anthropology, and multidisciplinary methodologies for writing early African history continued the program’s long-standing strengths in these areas imparted by Curtin, Vansina, and Feierman.⁷⁸ Sweet concentrated on placing Africans and their descendants in the Americas in African contexts, through comparative slavery, race, and nation in the Atlantic world, and world history. His acclaimed biography of Domingos Álvares, a Mahi healer captured in Dahomey’s wars of expansion in the 1730s and sent in slavery to Brazil, traced the career of this savvy survivor though multiple layers of the human isolation in the anonymizing context of the commercialization underway in Portugal’s 18th-century dominions in Brazil.⁷⁹ This intricate integration filled out Sweet’s initial training in the history of Latin America with Africa, bringing full circle Curtin’s initial movement across the Atlantic into Africa in the opposite direction.

Another intellectual “grandchild” of the Wisconsin school, Emily Callaci, arrived in Madison in 2012, further strengthening the contemporary culture component of the program with interests in modern eastern Africa.⁸⁰ Once again the skills of Wisconsin Africanist faculty resonated with Africanists in other departments of the university.⁸¹ The medical history accent in the Wisconsin school of African history received a vitalizing infusion with the university’s merger of the Department of History and its Department of the History of Medicine, adding three faculty members specialized in Africa and its diasporas.⁸² Sweet chaired the Department of History from 2012 to 2015, and in 2014 Kodesh assumed direction of the African Studies Program.

The Madison program suffered the loss of William Brown, who died in 2007. Spear retired in 2004, and Henige followed suit in 2010, along with Bernault in 2017. Despite these departures, the Wisconsin school’s distinctive coherence around multidisciplinary methodologies placing Africa in world historical patterns continues to contribute unique African sensibilities to emerging intellectual currents both in the study of history in Africa and increasingly to the discipline of history as a whole.⁸³