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Good evening, colleagues, and the Governor of Kisumu County, Professor Anyang Nyong’o! It is truly a pleasure for me to join you in this commemoration of the towering historian, scholar, and public intellectual, Bethwell Alan Ogot. I believe I speak on behalf of all of us in extending our deep gratitude to the Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa (CODESRIA) and the Department of History at Kenyatta University for organizing this important conference. Personally, my appreciation extends to that rarity of experiences, the opportunity to meet several of my former students at Kenyatta University between 1984 and 1989 who have become distinguished academics and administrators. It’s a befitting tribute to our intellectual father, grandfather, quickly becoming a great-grandfather, who was raised and spent his last years and is buried in nearby Yala, that this conference is being held in his home city of Kisumu, under the transformative leadership of one of Kenya’s leading scholars and public intellectuals, Governor Peter Anyang Nyong’o.
Introduction
Let me begin by noting that I last visited Kisumu in January 2019 to join Professor Ogot as he celebrated his 90th birthday. I first visited this city nearly forty years earlier, in 1980, when I was doing research for my doctoral dissertation on Kenyan economic and labor history, and spent time at this venue, the Tom Mboya Labor College. Professor Ogot had a lot to do with my interest in Kenyan history. My engagement with him goes back to 1976 when he served as external examiner at the University of Malawi.
Years later, he would proudly tell audiences at events where both of us were present that I owed my degree with distinction to him! In our classes on East African history, we had read Ogot’s books, and it was an indescribable honor and privilege to meet him in person. I was deeply touched and humbled when he asked to meet the student who had received the distinction, and he prevailed upon the department to bring me to the cottage along Lake Malawi, where the department took him to show their gratitude for bestowing the department with the distinction of his presence. .
That was the beginning of a lifelong mentoring and intellectual relationship that changed the trajectory of my personal and professional life, on which I will say more later.
When Professor Ogot passed away in January 2025, there was an avalanche of tributes in the popular and academic media celebrating his life and immense scholarly contributions. It is befitting that we are gathered here to remember and celebrate him as a towering historian and intellectual polymath.
Ogot belongs to an exceptional generation of the pioneering architects of the African academy in its multifaceted epistemic and institutional dimensions. These were extraordinary individuals, inspired by the fierce historical and humanistic urgency and imperatives of African nationalism: decolonization, nation-building, regional integration, development, and democracy. They were driven by the audacity, passion, and commitment to remaking the production, dissemination, and consumption of knowledge in, and for, Africa and the world.
They were scholar-activists who transformed existing disciplines and founded new ones, who built interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary paradigms, perspectives and practices, who believed in the power of education as a public good and engine of development, who relished their role as rigorous academics and public intellectuals, who jealously guarded academic freedom and the intelligentsia as the conscience of their new nation-states.
Their lives were large, complex, and multilayered. The trajectory of Ogot’s career is quite emblematic of his peers, born between the third and fourth decades of the twentieth century in the immediate aftermath of the formation of the colonial conquest state, whose ideologues deluded themselves would last for centuries, if not millennia, only to collapse spectacularly as Ogot and his peers matured into adulthood. I would like to explore, rather briefly given the limitations of time, five aspects of Professor Ogot’s remarkable life and legacy: Ogot the man, the historian, the institution builder, the public figure, and the mentor. Let me add that today we’ve heard much about many of these themes. My excuse for revisiting them is that I came a long way, and I have to justify my ticket!
Ogot the Man
Biographical reflections and commemorations are always selective, much like historical writing itself, in which certain events, milestones, turning points, contexts, and meanings are chosen for emphasis. In terms of his public life and persona, I would like to comment on three.
First, the multiplicity of Ogot’s identities. He proudly and unapologetically embraced his ethnic, national, regional, continental, and global identities as a Luo, Kenyan, East African, African, and human being, respectively, who felt confident and comfortable speaking about their specificities, differences, and interconnections. He was also capaciously interdisciplinary in his curiosities, inquiries, perspectives, and outputs. His first love was mathematics, which he studied and taught for many years, before he gravitated to history and the humanities and social sciences. His mathematical training and mindset was evident in the rigor and exactitude with which he approached his reconstruction of the Luo using oral tradition, and across many of his writings.
Second, there was the plurality of his influences. To begin with, like many in his generation and even after, he received his education at home and abroad. He attended Makerere in Uganda, the first higher education institution in East Africa, which cultivated a generation of regionally minded graduates, before trekking to the imperial metropole, Britain, for his graduate studies at the University of St. Andrews, where he encountered colonial and postcolonial students from the crumbling empire, which engendered a cosmopolitan and global consciousness inflected by Third World solidarities, as today’s Global South was then labeled.
Moreover, his generation witnessed the key and formative moments of the twentieth and the still unfolding twenty-first century, from World War II to decolonization, the Cold War to vicious proxy hot wars, the second to the fourth industrial revolutions, neoliberal globalization to populist deglobalization, the various waves of democratization and authoritarianism, worldwide pandemics to climate crises, and the proliferation of mass media, mass consumption, mass education, not to mention hegemonic shifts including the relative decline of Euro-America and rise of Afro-Asia. Not only did they live through what one can call the long twentieth century, they also helped us to understand it.
Ogot’s intellectual peers included prodigious figures who rescued Africa from the long night of Eurocentric epistemic darkness that diminished our humanity and history, denigrated our societies and cultures, dismissed our politics and futures. They included in Kenya such acclaimed thinkers as Ali Mazrui, the political scientist, Simeon Ominde, the geographer, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, the writer, Wangari Maathai, the environmentalist, and Thomas Odhiambo, the entomologist.
Among historians, he counted among his interlocutors the editors of the UNESCO General History, Adu Boahen of Ghana, Joseph Ki-Zerbo of Burkina Faso, J. Ade Ajayi of Nigeria, Gamal Mokhtar of Egypt, Mohammed El Fasi of Morocco, Djibril Tamsir Niane, and many others. I had an opportunity to meet many of these editors when they held a conference in Nairobi in December 1984 for which I served as rapporteur. It was intoxicating for a young lecturer to encounter these giants of African history.
Outside the continent there was hardly any major Africanist scholar that Ogot didn’t know, engage, or debate as evident from his copious library that included hundreds of dissertations they sent him from their institutions that lined his extensive home library, which overwhelmed me when I first saw it. .
Ogot the Historian
Ogot was the most prominent historian to emerge from Kenya and East Africa in the 20th century. His significance lies in four main areas. First, his methodological contributions were immense, especially in the development of oral tradition as a legitimate source in historical research and writing. This emerged out of a profound critique of the colonial archive, and a pluralist conception of historical sources to reconstruct the human past. Privileging the colonial archive centered European experiences and perspectives and marginalized, even invisibilized African voices. Indeed, the official colonial records were also male-centric, as feminist historiography, which integrated oral methodology, amply demonstrated in its two-pronged project of recovering women’s history and engendering history as a whole.
Ogot and his generation also promoted and integrated in their massive reconstruction of African history at various spatio-temporal scales from the local to the regional to the global, and sources from archaeology, historical linguistics, climatology, and botany, among others. Ogot was long associated with, and mentored, many Kenyan archaeologists and was a critical interlocutor for foreign archaeologists working in Kenya and East Africa. Apart from its inherent biases, written sources only cover a short span of human life on this planet, about 5,000 years for those with ancient written records some of which are in Africa, which represents a minuscule proportion of the human story, which originated in Africa. Even without its fatal flaws, human history that is universal and planetary in scope cannot, by definition, be based on the relatively recent and parochial colonial archives.
Ogot’s valorization of methodological pluralism was matched by his theoretical openness and his critical engagement with evolving analytical frameworks. Undergirding his work and that of his generation was nationalist historiography, the pre-eminence they gave to centering African agency, activities, adaptations, aspirations, ideas, and choices in the changing contexts of the continent’s extensive history, the longest in the world. They pioneered decolonization, understood in four critical ways: first, decentering and deconstructing Eurocentrism across the disciplines; second, building African knowledge production institutions and outlets from universities to research networks, from book series to journals; third, systematically valuing, normalizing and integrating African thought and thinkers; and fourth, engaging the intellectual traditions of Asia and Latin America on their own terms.
Contemporary decolonial scholars, who seem preoccupied with the first task and relish exhibiting their familiarity with the latest faddish and often depoliticized theorizing from the Global North, can learn from the decolonization generation. Ogot also embraced and exercised critical engagement with emerging epistemic and policy trends such as Marxism and dependency, which was the rage for my generation, historical ecology and environmental studies, the posts (post-structuralism, postmodernism, and postcolonialism), and neo-liberalism. In my conversations with him, I never ceased to be amazed by how current he was with emerging intellectual trends in his capacious reading, and how thoughtful his critiques were.
It was through his prodigious publications that Ogot showed his prowess as a historian and an intellectual. In spatial terms, his work covered the ethnohistory of the Luo, the national history of Kenya including the contentious debates about the role of Mau Mau in the country’s decolonization, development and politics, continental history as one of the editors of the UNESCO General History of Africa, as well as world history. Thematically, he covered cultural history, socioeconomic history, environmental history, urban history, religious history, and intellectual history.
Ogot’s publications ranged from voluminous sole-authored books, edited volumes, monographs, book chapters, scholarly articles, and popular essays. He wrote continuously way into his nineties. I recall that when I met him at his home in Yala for his 90th birthday, he talked animatedly about his forthcoming book on the history of Nairobi. Ogot was a lifelong learner, researcher, and writer, the quintessential intellectual who exemplified the exquisite joys of the life of the mind.
Ogot’s impact also derives from the power of his curricular interventions. Several of his edited books served as school and college textbooks that cultivated the historical imaginations of generations of students. The influence of his works was facilitated in no small measure by the fact that national history examinations tested the contents found in his books, derived from them, or those written by his many mentees and followers. Ogot and his peers Africanized history as a discipline, sometimes in the face of resistance by elites still wedded to the illusory allure of the colonial library, as V.Y.Mudimbe called it, and the alienating syllabi in the local outposts of British schools.
Ogot the Institution Builder
Ogot’s academic standing rests on both his scholarship and his role as an institution builder. He served in various administrative positions. He was the inaugural Deputy Vice Chancellor, Academic Affairs at the University of Nairobi from 1970 to 1973, where he was also Dean, Faculty of Arts, founding Director of the Institute of African Studies, and Chairman of the Department of History. In each of these roles, he established the scholarly parameters and governance systems for these programs.
Additionally, he served as Chancellor of Moi University in Eldoret from 2003 to 2013, during which he helped oversee the creation and expansion of several constituent university colleges that later became fully-fledged public universities, such as Karatina University, Masinde Muliro University, and Kabianga University.
Later in his life, he joined Maseno University, where he served as Founder and Director of the Institute of Research and Postgraduate Studies (IRPS), and the UNESCO Chair for Higher Education in Africa, a role focused on elevating educational standards and fostering regional academic partnerships across the continent.
He also held leadership roles in academic-adjacent organizations at various stages of his career. This included Director of the International Louis Leakey Memorial Institute for African Prehistory, an integral research wing tied to the National Museums of Kenya.
His leadership role in the publishing industry was also remarkable. In 1964, he became Editor-in-Chief of the East African Journal launched by the East African Institute of Social and Cultural Affairs (EAISCA). The journal evolved into the premier forum of critical debate and controversy. Ogot served as the Secretary-General of EAISCA and concurrently became the first Chairman of the East African Publishing House (EAPH), which bypassed Eurocentric gatekeepers and famously published seminal local works, including Song of Lawino by Okot p’Bitek, early fiction by his wife Grace Ogot, memoirs of freedom fighters like Waruhiu Itote (General China), and Ogot’s own landmark thesis, History of the Southern Luo.
Furthermore, he was the inaugural Secretary-General of the Jomo Kenyatta Foundation, which became a central pillar of the Kenyan educational publishing ecosystem, directly developing and distributing curriculum textbooks tailored to independent Kenya’s new syllabus. As President of the Historical Association of Kenya, he directed publishing initiatives that birthed the Kenya Historical Review and the Hadith book series, printing groundbreaking research on regional history.
Finally, later in his life, he founded his own local, Kisumu-based outfit called Anyange Press. Through this press, he released his later volumes, intellectual collections, and autobiographical accounts, demonstrating that rigorous, high-quality scholarship could be fully sustained and printed entirely outside Nairobi. In 1998, Anyange published one of my monographs based on a public lecture I gave at Maseno in 1997.
Ogot the Public Figure
Another important feather in Ogot’s cap was his role as a public figure both through the roles he played and the positions his beloved wife held as a famous writer and politician. He was also appointed to various state corporations and cultural heritage institutions by Kenya’s first three presidents.
During the regime of President Kenyatta, he reportedly refused a cabinet position to stay focused on academia, in which he worked closely with the state to transition the local university college of the University of East Africa into the fully independent University of Nairobi in 1970. He also accepted appointment to serve as a Member of the East African Community Legislative Assembly from 1975 to 1977.
During the long tenure of President Moi, Ogot was appointed as chairman of several critical parastatal positions including the Kenya Posts and Telecommunications Corporation, Kenya Railways, and the National Oil Corporation of Kenya.
Under President Kibaki, with whom Ogot shared a long personal friendship dating to their days at Makerere, Ogot was appointed Chancellor of Moi University, and as noted earlier played a critical role in the expansion of the Kenyan higher education system.
Through these appointments, Ogot was seen as a collaborator of the state, and sometimes even dismissed in progressive intellectual circles and among radical emergent democratic forces as an “intellectual homeguard” of the Moi regime. These charges oversimplified his relationship with the political authorities.
His public roles went beyond Kenya, most significantly through his work with UNESCO. He served as President of the International Scientific Committee tasked with the monumental preparation and drafting of UNESCO’s General History of Africa. This 8-volume masterpiece, which many regard as the most significant historiographical achievement of the twentieth century, buried Eurocentric narratives and restored the epistemic autonomy and authority of African history and historians. He personally edited Volume V: Africa from the Sixteenth to the Eighteenth Century, coordinating an international network of historians to synthesize complex regional movements.
He represented the African region as a high-ranking member of UNESCO’s Executive Board, and he also served on the International Commission for UNESCO’s History of Humanity. In recognition of his massive contributions to global historical scholarship UNESCO awarded him its prestigious Gold Medal. Later in his life he held the prestigious UNESCO Chair for Higher Education in Africa hosted at Maseno University, using the position to foster regional research excellence and train future African academics.
Ogot was heavily involved in Pan-African academic institutions aimed at uniting intellectual output across the African continent. For example, he served as President of the Pan-African Archaeological Association, a premier continental organization from 1977 to 1983, bridging the gap between archeology and oral historiography to trace African societies before colonial rule.
Ogot was sought after by major international academic societies across Europe and America. He was recognized by the U.S. African Studies Association, receiving the Distinguished Africanist Award in 2001 and delivering the Bashorun M.K.O. Abiola Distinguished Lecture in 2008, which I happily presided over as President of the ASA. The ASA also established the Bethwell A. Ogot Book Prize to honor the best annual scholarly work on East Africa.
His list of international fellowships is no less remarkable. He was elected an Honorary Fellow of the Historical Society of Ghana and the British Institute in Eastern Africa for his landmark contributions to the archaeological and historical sciences. Moreover, he was a long-serving external examiner and institutional advisor across Africa and for various globally ranked universities, including the University of Cambridge, University of Sussex, and Uppsala University in Sweden. As I noted at the beginning of my talk, I first met Ogot as an external examiner at the University of Malawi in 1976.
Ogot’s public intellectualism extended to his uncanny ability to bring ideologically diverse academies and academics together, including the old guard of imperial history, pioneer African nationalist historians, emerging area studies specialists, and radical young historians and scholars. Because his methodologies were airtight, he forced conservative Western institutions and scholars to accept oral history as a legitimate academic discipline. In the 1960s and 1970s, as Euro-American universities established African Studies departments, centers, or programs, Ogot became their vital continental link, ensuring that foreign scholars did not treat Africa as a passive laboratory, but instead engaged directly with local researchers, local archives, and living African elders.
The most explosive ideological tension was between Ogot’s empirical nationalism and the rising tide of radical Marxist, dependency-theory scholars, who often viewed Ogot’s focus on cultural lineages and ethnic migrations as old-fashioned, bourgeois, or complicit with the post-colonial capitalist state. Ogot’s unique genius was that he never shut down these radical voices. Instead, as the convener of the Historical Association of Kenya and the head of the UNESCO General History of Africa committee, he deliberately put Marxists, liberals, nationalists, and imperialists in the same room. He forced them to debate intellectual concepts rather than trade political insults, effectively transforming volatile ideological gridlock into the most comprehensive collection of African history ever produced.
Clearly. Professor Ogot was a public intellectual par excellence that his mentees, including me, tried to emulate. I recall during an interview for a deanship at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles when I was asked which scholar I most admired, I mentioned Ogot, because of his role as a public intellectual, whose work transcended the narrow walls of university lecture halls, and unlike scholars who write exclusively for other academics, through peer-reviewed journals and books Ogot directly shaped public consciousness, national policy, and collective cultural identity.
A core role of a public intellectual is to challenge dominant paradigms that dehumanize or marginalize society or other peoples. Ogot used his historical research to actively dismantle Eurocentric assertions that Africa had no history before the white man arrived. By proving that oral traditions were valid historical sources, he restored cultural pride and historical agency to ordinary Kenyans and East Africans, translating academic research into a popular tool for psychological decolonization.
Ogot believed that an intellectual’s duty was to shape how the public is socialized. He went beyond writing history books to revolutionizing Kenya’s entire post-independence curriculum. He chaired and influenced educational commissions to ensure that primary and secondary school textbooks were African-centered, shifting the entire nation away from the colonial-era syllabus to a curriculum focused on local heritage, geographies, and heroes.
Ogot chose to anchor his work locally rather than escaping to prestigious Western universities, like some of his peers like Mazrui and some of us in my generation! He engaged directly with the Kenyan state to build public institutions. By accepting appointments to head public university systems and critical state corporations, he used his intellectual rigor to address the practical, administrative, and developmental challenges facing a young, growing nation.
As a public intellectual, Ogot frequently used essays, public lectures, and opinion pieces to weigh in on urgent national debates. For instance, he wrote extensively on how Kenyans could construct a meaningful, unified national legacy out of the divisive memories of the Mau Mau liberation war. He also publicly critiqued the macro-economic pressures of globalization and the structural adjustment policies of international financial institutions, like the World Bank on African societies.
Finally, as a public intellectual, Ogot believed that knowledge belonged to the public. He founded the Historical Association of Kenya, which intentionally brought together university professors, high school teachers, and local community elders to discuss and preserve local histories. This democratized history, ensuring it wasn’t just an elite academic pursuit but a living, community-driven dialogue.
Ogot the Mentor
Ogot’s legacy lies and lives through the careers and impact of his numerous mentees in Kenya, across Africa and around the world. I count myself among them. He is the one who inspired my interest in East African history. For my master’s degree I focused on Tanzania, and for my PhD I eagerly settled on Kenya. I was affiliated with the history department at the University of Nairobi for fifteen months between 1979 and 1980, where I engaged some of Kenya’s most illustrious historians and scholars and matured as an African historian.
During this time I occasionally met Ogot, who was as warm and welcoming, humane and inspiring as ever. It was not until I joined Kenyatta University College, later Kenyatta University, in 1984 that I really got to bond with the esteemed professor. Before arriving at KU, I had written a paper on decolonization for a conference in Toronto commemorating the 100th anniversary of the Berlin Conference on the partition of Africa. Anxiously, I shared it with the great historian. To my eternal surprise and joy, not only did he like it, but he proposed that we expand it for a joint presentation for a conference on decolonization in Harare, Zimbabwe, convened by leading American historians, Prosser Gifford and William Roger Louis. Our paper offered a searing critique of decolonization studies and paradigms that privileged global and metropolitan forces in the decolonization drama rather than African nationalist struggles.
When the organizers decided to exclude our paper from the conference collection, in solidarity, other African historians threatened to withdraw theirs as well. The pressure worked and our paper, “Kenya’s Road to Independence and After,” was published in the volume, Decolonization and African Independence: The Transfers of Power, 1960-1980, published by Yale University Press in 1988. Through this episode I encountered academic gatekeeping by white scholars in the citadels of imperial power and resolved to spend my intellectual labor critiquing and dismantling their epistemic practices and paradigms. I also learned about the power of cultivating and belonging to African intellectual communities. No wonder, from 1990 I gravitated to CODESRIA and have remained its indefatigable supporter and defender.
I recall fondly when we worked together at KU, on Wednesdays, the day Ogot held his classes, he would take me to lunch at Safari Park hotel, which was a treat for a poorly paid lecturer. While I was eager to hear his prolific and probing ideas on many issues, he seemed more interested in discussing my research projects. “Young man, what are you working on now,” he would say and listen intently, occasionally offering incisive comments and direction. It was a mentoring relationship that was mutually gratifying, intellectually stimulating, and profoundly transformative for me. From him I learned the generosity and value of a healthy mentoring relationship, which stimulates intellectual curiosity and brings cognitive joy to both mentor and mentee.
When I left Kenya in 1990, I kept in touch with him, including introducing him to my colleagues at Pennsylvania State University when he came to visit his son, Madara, who was my colleague at Penn State, inviting him to give the Abiola Lecture at the ASA in 2008, and when I returned to Kenya and served as vice chancellor of USIU-Africa from 2016-2021, I was thrilled to talk to him regularly and visit during his 90th birthday in 2019.
Ogot acted as mentor to many more scholars than we can count. Among them are William Ochieng’ who chaired the Department of History at KU when I was there, Godfrey Muriuki who succeeded him as chair of the history department at the University of Nairobi, and E.S. Atieno-Odhiambo, who relocated to Rice University, a university I almost joined as dean. One could argue that Ogot created what could be called the Nairobi school of African history that differed from both the Dar es Salaam and Ibadan schools in its analytical focus: while Ibadan highlighted pre-colonial elites and state-building, and Dar es Salaam utilized a Marxist, dependency-theory critique of capitalism, the Nairobi school pioneered a pluralistic approach focused on localized micro-histories, migration patterns, and socio-ethnic interactions.
Thus, while the Ibadan school responded to Eurocentric biases by proving Africa had vast empires before the Europeans arrived, Ogot’s Nairobi school argued that focusing only on large centralized states ignored the vast majority of Africans who lived in stateless or decentralized societies. While all three schools utilized oral history to counter colonial texts, the Nairobi school perfected the methodology for tracing genealogies, migrations, and settlement patterns over centuries. Ogot’s foundational work on the migration of the Southern Luo set a blueprint for extracting highly precise historical timelines from oral memory alone. In his reconstruction of his father’s lineage, Barack Obama’s book, Dreams of My Father, owes a profound, foundational debt to Ogot’s pioneering work..
In the 1970s, the Dar es Salaam school became a radical hub capturing global attention with Walter Rodney’s seminal text, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. They argued that political independence meant nothing without economic emancipation from global capital. The Nairobi school steered clear of this strict Marxist or dependency-theory framework, preferring a more empirical approach that prioritized local social dynamics and regional integration over global economic critique.
Another critical feature of the Nairobi school is that it eschewed the grand narratives of nationalism and postcolonial nation-state formation; it interrogated nation-building through multi-ethnic negotiation and accommodation in so far as they focused on how diverse ethnic groups historically encountered, clashed, traded, and intermarried with one another. They viewed African history not as a monolithic struggle against European empires, but as a dynamic confluence of internal migrations that shaped modern, multi-ethnic nations.
What I found truly impressive is the fact that even though Ogot was politically conservative and aligned with the state, he protected and mentored young, anti-establishment, “radical” academics and student leaders. He would shield them from state crackdowns or hostile university councils while offering pragmatic counsel on surviving under authoritarian regimes.
He offered principled collaboration with younger peers to permanently alter African academia. For instance, he famously partnered with a young Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o (whom he had previously taught mathematics at Alliance High School) to lobby the University of Nairobi to abolish the colonial Department of English and replace it with a globally progressive Department of Literature.
Conclusion
I would like to conclude by making reference to two speeches delivered earlier this morning. First, is the admonition from Governor Nyong’o. He implored us that the best way to remember Ogot is not to worship him, or dismiss him, but to interrogate his work, and build on it with new insights, evidence, and interpretations. Living tradition and confident civilizations thrive from internal self-critique, by taking their thinkers seriously enough to continuously engage them robustly and critically.
My generation was critical of the nationalist historians, whose celebratory accounts of African self-fashioning we felt ignored issues of internal social class formation, struggles, inequalities, uneven development, and the persistent global structures of dependency, extraction, and exploitation. I recall the vibrant discussions, indeed debates, I used to have with Ogot about Kenyan history, using dependency and Marxist perspectives, which he didn’t always agree with, but fully and critically engaged with. This is captured in two of my chapters in his festschrift, published to mark his 60th birthday in 1989, A Modern History of Kenya: 1895-1980: Essays in Honor of B.A. Ogot, edited by William Robert Ochieng’.
The question we have to ask, which Toyin Falola raised in his keynote address: Who is writing African history now, on what platforms, and for whom? In the context of this commemoration, one can add: how is the current generation of active historians building on the various African intellectual libraries? I focus on the current generation because mine is no longer actively involved in researching and writing history as such; we’re more into drawing metatheoretical insights and interpretations, and increasingly even in self-reflexivity befitting a retiring generation of scholars. The libraries include what I call the ancient, such as the Pharaonic corpus, religious (Christian and Islamic epistemic traditions), Indigenous, colonial, and diaspora knowledge systems.
What are the structural conditions, ideological demands, and epistemic imperatives that shape African history today? How is this generation critiquing and building upon the work of Ogot and his generation? How are you reading and interrogating the work of my generation? What are the distinctive questions you are asking about Africa and the world? What kind of history are you writing in terms of its temporal and spatial scales, and thematic and topical foci?
My generation committed an egregious error; in our neo-Marxist and dependency preoccupations, we abandoned the longue durée of African history and focused on the colonial and postcolonial periods where these theoretical models best fit? Please don’t make our mistakes. Produce African history in all its capacious depth and breadth.
Thanks to Ogot’s influence and the insatiable youthful curiosity of my students at KU, I tried to correct for that mistake by spending a decade researching and trying to understand African economies before the establishment of colonial capitalism and economies, as reflected in my book, A Modern Economic History of Africa published by CODESRIA in 1993. In my teaching at a couple of the universities in the U.S. I created a course on African histories over the past 20,000 years. When I did that I fully understood Ajayi’s point made at a conference of African historians in 1967 that colonialism was a footnote, a parenthesis in African history.
What are your primary audiences, publishing platforms, and modalities of engagement with each other within your respective countries, across subregions, the continent, and with the diaspora, as well as with other historians and scholars, especially in the Global South? What do you want your legacy to be, and how are you already passing it to the generation behind you, your students?
Thank you!
