Making it up as we go along? Using unreliable sources for fun and profit in the social history of Africa. Diana Jeater, History School, UWE, St Matthias Campus, BRISTOL, BS16 2JP, UK.
[email protected]. Writing 'history from below' always presents difficulties in finding and interpreting the voices of people who have been excluded from the writing classes. We hear the voices of 'moral economy' rioters in eighteenth century England through the words of their local magistrate; we hear the voices of popular witchcraft accusation in early modern Europe through the depositions of the inquisitor. Studying the social history of southern Africa during the early stages of white occupation presents particular problems, because African societies did not use writing, and did not use European languages. The written archival records are therefore two removes from the people we wish to study: Africans' lives have been recorded by people outside their culture, and using a language which was not designed to reflect or encompass their culture. This is why I consider these sources to be 'unreliable'. They may appear as empirical evidence about African social formations, but I suspect that often they are not - not if they are read as they stand. Whites knew very little about Africans, partly because they asked the wrong questions and partly because they didn't ask many questions at all. What they did know, they often misunderstood. My starting-point, then, is that you can't trust anything you read in the Archives - which is a bit of problem if you want to be a historian.