The History of the Family in Africa: Introduction

TLDR: In this paper, the authors present a selection of the papers in this special issue of the Journal that were originally presented at a conference held at the School of Oriental and African Studies under the joint auspices of the School and the British Social Science Research Council, in September 1981, with the aim of stimulating research on a range of questions which could be fruitfully explored in the African context, and which could possibly also feed into the wider history of the family in Britain, America and Europe.

Abstract: The papers in this special issue of the Journal were originally presented to a conference held at the School of Oriental and African Studies under the joint auspices of the School and the British Social Science Research Council, in September 1981. The conference, which grew out of an earlier series of seminars run by the S.O.A.S. History Department, arose out of the editors' concern that the history of the family, which had become so lively and important an area of study in Europe and America since the 1960s, was being almost totally neglected in Africa; through the seminars, the conference and now the publication of a selection of the papers in the Journal we hoped to stimulate research on a range of questions which could be fruitfully explored in the African context, and which could possibly also feed into the wider historiography on the family in Britain, America and Europe.For many of its formative years, the study of history was concerned in the main with the history of the dominant, of ‘great men’ and their institutions, states and government, armies, churches and culture. The history of the dominated, of ‘ordinary people’ was thought to be lost, for the majority of our ancestors left no obvious written record from which their lives could be re-created. From 1929, when Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre founded the journal Annales d'histoire economique et sociale, this view has been increasingly challenged, and it is fair to say that today the past of ordinary people is at least as significant historiographically as that of famous leaders or powerful institutions.