Re-Mapping, Re-Spacing and Re-Connecting Africa – Editors’ Introduction

A recurrent theme in the contributions to this volume of History in Africa is a concern with re-mapping places, spaces, and connections in African history. Of course, historians of Africa are only too aware of how complex even the history of the term “Africa” itself is: it is a term introduced by outsiders around the first century AD, that has referred to various sections of the continent, and that only became the term to denote the entire continent hundreds of years after its first documented use for an area covering parts of the southern Mediterranean coast between current Morocco and Libya. Similarly, the names of places and spaces mentioned in the historical sources we use were often not fixed, unspecific and at times downright wrong. This reflects the inaccuracies and confusions of older sources such as travel narratives produced by (mostly European) outsiders (and the fact that we tend to read these sources with a different aim than they were originally produced for). Added to this was the, at times, uncritical use of such sources by scholars in previous generations, whose texts however continue to influence assumptions and perceptions of historians today. Local African (oral) sources have not been easier to work with, as many similarly use more than one name for the same place (and refer to several places with the same name), which is not problematic, except for historians who want to determine what happened at a particular moment at a specific place (or what was the place of origin of a particular individual whose biography they are reconstructing).