Kenyan Veterans on Remembrance Day, 2018

African Oral History

The AFAS Oral History Project

The recollections of ordinary African women and men are often the best, and often the only, historical sources for much of twentieth-century African history. Unfortunately, however, we are losing members of these past generations far too quickly. The people with viable memories of the transfer of power in the 1960s are now, at minimum, over sixty and surviving members of the founding generation of African nationalists are far older.  It is therefore essential that we record and preserve the memories and life histories of these people while we still can. Imagine what American historians could learn if they were able to interview the founding fathers (and mothers) of the United States a half century later in 1826?

Mindful of these possibilities, Washington University’s Department of African and African American Studies is undertaking an African oral history project. This collaboration between WU faculty, graduate students and undergraduates and the people who lived through these important historical eras is creating a unique historical record that offers new perspectives on African history while helping individual informants better preserve their own life stories for themselves and their descendants.  In addition to this “service to the community” (both in St. Louis and in Africa), the project gives WU students training and firsthand experience in oral history methodologies, and the resulting data serves as the basis for original scholarship including senior theses, dissertations, and collaborative faculty publications.

Oral History Projects

Kenyan Veterans of the Second World War

We have also been working with a team of Kenyan filmmakers who are working a documentary on the experiences of surviving African veterans of the Second World War. Victoria Mutheu, Sagwa Chabeda, and Stan Barua have already put together an extremely promising and highly polished series of sample interviews. AFAS is assisting this team by helping to research and produce more of these sample interviews with an eye toward a major funding proposal and documentary project. Additionally, Ms. Mutheu and her team will join our oral history workshops via Skype. This, in effect, will create a virtual international community of scholars all working on various aspects of Africanist oral history.

African History in St. Louis

Beginning first with older expatriate Kenyans, and then perhaps moving to include Somalis and other diasporic communities, we will commence with a series of simple conversations with older Africans living in St. Louis about the key experiences and perceptions of their youth. Emphasizing the absolute necessity of protecting individual privacy, we will invite our informants to take part in a serious of oral history workshops where they will share their experiences with a public audience of students, faculty, and members of the wider St. Louis community.

Visit the African Oral History Collection

The African Oral History Collection is archived at Washington University Libraries. Visit the Collection Guide below for detailed information about the collection and updates on contents.

Collection Guide

The need for Africanist oral history

By conventional definition, history is the study of written records.  Most often, these written records have been the archives of state institutions, which has privileged elite and bureaucratic perspectives over those of ordinary people.  Even more problematically, this Eurocentric bias has complicated the study of African history because, until the western conquest of Africa in the late nineteenth century, most Africans societies relied on memories, transmitted orally, to preserve and recollect their past.  Consequently, imperial conquerers portrayed Africans as a people without history, which in effect implied that their culture was static, tribalistic, and inherently primitive.  This allowed liberal democracies like France and Britain who sponsored the imperialists to legitimize their conquests by portraying Africans as simple tribesmen in need of a guiding hand to achieve “modernity.”  

While historically black colleges in the United States had pushed back against these pernicious stereotypes for decades, most western history departments only acknowledged the existence of African history in the 1960s in response to the end of empire in Africa and the successes of the American civil rights movement.

Moving beyond conventional historical sources that reinforced the colonial view of Africa, a new generation of historians placed oral history and tradition on equal footing with conventional archival records.  In doing so they gave the lived experiences of ordinary people equal weight to “official” state, military, educational, and mission records.  Oral history both corrected the records of the colonial era and filled in the institutional gaps resulting from post-colonial African governments’s inability and unwillingness to continue the bureaucratic record keeping traditions of their predecessors.

Who is involved in the African oral history project?

Rudolph Clay

Head of library diversity initiatives and outreach
rudolphc@wustl.edu

Victoria Mutheu Mutisya

Independent Scholar and Filmmaker
askari.kenya@gmail.com

Mungai Mutonya

Teaching Professor and Linguist, African and African American Studies
mmutonya@wustl.edu

Timothy Parsons

Professor of History and African and African American Studies
tparsons@wustl.edu

Sonya Rooney

University Archivist, Julian Edison Department of Special Collections
srooney@wustl.edu

Student Leaders

Golda (Kosi) Onyeneho, 2017-18

Amarachi Onyema, 2018-19

Lopaka O’Connor, 2019-20

Ellen Bresnick, 2020-2021

Julia Stewart, 2020-2021

Ayana Lloyd, 2021-2022

Nash Overfield, 2021-2022

Rou Hu, 2022-Present

Jermicah Lott, 2022-Present

Henry Michael, 2022-Present