Introduction^{Footnote 1}

In much of Africanist historical writing, including the very best of it, a loose jumble of perception, narration, and preliminary analysis often works subtly as a supplement, a substitute, or even a corrective for other forms of historical evidence. This jumble, which I refer to here as “experience,” operates as a discreet third form of evidence alongside that which we categorize very broadly as either “archival” or “oral.” While historians of Africa often take experience as evidence, believing it lends authority to our work, we tend to do so reflexively rather than methodically. Is that adequate? Recent historiographical work would suggest that it is not, that a turn to experience – and all the suppositions regarding the fixity of the subject and self that may accompany it – represents an abdication of a deeper critical responsibility, and even of a critical sensibility.^{Footnote 2} That may be so, but it need not be, and not only because theoretically informed work might also be empirically rich. Arguably the “eclecticism” of historians of Africa is both necessary and desirable. In a context in which prevalent theoretical orientations and social scientific models struggle to capture adequately African dynamics, experience might provide what Florence Bernault termed in the course of our roundtable “rocks in our shoes,” irritants that press themselves upon us as fortuitous accidents, as niggling questions demanding explanation. If Africanist historians draw questions, rather than (only) answers, from informed and critical observation and engagement, then perhaps experience is critique.^{Footnote 3} Is that enough?

In this paper, I think through the problem of experience-as-evidence in relation to three recent books – two of them, coincidentally, on the Atlantic world, and the third being my own – and I argue that if Africanist historiography is to remain especially reliant on this category of evidence and resource for writing, it merits greater critical attention.

Experience as Evidence: Witnessing, Reporting, Self-Reflection

Historians of Africa tend to use what I am calling experience in three linked ways. We do so first as witnessing, that is as a form of empirical evidence, usually but not exclusively speaking to minor points. Few arguments hang on experience alone, but many are informed by it. Second, we draw on experience to produce a kind of reportage, by which I mean a kind of first-person narration used for stylistic or rhetorical ends, often as a kind of leavening in what might otherwise be the heavy dough of our evidence. It is easy to underestimate how important this kind of reportage can be and how readily it can drift towards making rather than informing the over-arching argument. Third, we engage with experience as raw material for self-reflection; in such arguments the self, anchored in a distinct moment, is the true subject of the analysis (or at least one of the subjects).

Saidiya Hartman’s Lose Your Mother, for instance, eloquently performs such work of self-reflection.^{Footnote 4} However, in Hartman’s book, history is in fact the minor partner in what the subtitle terms a Journey along the Atlantic Slave Route, an historically grounded exploration of the self and the diaspora. For Hartman, experience in Ghana tracing the trade routes is indeed a form of evidence – evidence for, among other things, the relationship between Africa and African-America and for the aftermath of enslavement, slavery, and the slave trade. In Lose Your Mother, historical passages serve as a kind of counterpoint to self-reflection; to a significant degree, the true subject of the book is Hartman herself, including reflections on the author’s names, her childhood, and her youthful self that allow us to see her position vis-à-vis Africa and its diaspora as both unique and synechdochal. History is both vital to and, taken alone, inadequate for Hartman’s project.

Toby Green’s The Rise of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade in Western Africa, 1300–1589 is a very different kind of book.^{Footnote 5} In it, Green offers a striking example of how experience – or the fact of having “been there” – might be used when history is the subject. Green’s book explores the process of “creolisation” in early Atlantic Western Africa, arguing that diasporas produced the Atlantic world, as well as being produced by it. The concept of culture plays an essential role in his argument, which resides on the premise that the study of cultural exchange and expressions – implicitly including present practices – offers superior insights into the past of the Atlantic World than quantitatively-oriented studies can provide.^{Footnote 6} Although Green is analyzing a period that comes to a close in the sixteenth century, this analytical posture allows him to make two consequential moves regarding experience. The first – what I think of as his “been there” move – comes early in the book when Green asserts experience as his first – although, it must be stressed, not his primary – form of evidence in a work that stands on an impressive documentary base.^{Footnote 7} The second move is to use a kind of loose ethnographic observation to link the present with the past. Green expresses due skepticism of ethnographies that too tightly tie contemporary masquerades to long-ago slave raids, but he also argues that “the historical approach can not do without the ethnographic.”^{Footnote 8} This form of reasoning is at work in a later vignette that links the twenty-first century circumstance of an aging marabout – whose decline effects the status of his entire village – to a reflection on how “rituals and the supernatural became hard to separate from the Atlantic trade.”^{Footnote 9}

Green’s work is especially rich, and he was a writer before training as an academic historian. Precisely because Green writes fluently, the reader may detect a kind of subtle shading in his book from one usage of experience to another. In particular, the instinct of employing reportage fades into witnessing as a kind of evidence. That works rather well in a travel account Green published a decade ago, but The Rise of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade is part of another genre altogether.^{Footnote 10} In it, Green is not witnessing the fifteenth century; rather, he is making a claim about its refraction in the present. If pigs and pork are absent from one island of the Cape Verde archipelago, yet common on its neighbor, might that observation support the conclusion that New Christians settled on the first but not the second of those islands? Green’s hypothesis that they did is based partly on documents and inference, but he marshals experience in further support of it.^{Footnote 11} He did not see any pigs. He did see people stoop to touch the threshold of houses as they entered, which reminded him of a common Jewish practice of affixing a ritual object on doorposts. In general terms, such a claim can be made in a modest way – “this practice…. was something I observed” – that is at the same time irrefutable and virtually immune to rebuttal.^{Footnote 12} It is difficult to argue, “you did not;” observation becomes fact, and one can only dispute the way in which it is interpreted in favor of a larger argument (or the idea that it matters at all). Green uses experience subtly and effectively. Yet while his instinct for reportage make for good reading, the relationship between good writing (and therefore good reading) on the one hand and disciplined argumentation on the other is a complex one.

Experience as Provocation

In a rather different fashion, experience nourishes historical inquiry by provoking questions. That is, rather than providing evidence that speaks to existing questions, experience may incite, invite, or demand new ones. Green tells us that this is how he came to his topic: via time spent in the region pursuing distinct but related questions.^{Footnote 13} In my own book, From Empires to NGO’s in the West African Sahel, I make a similar move. The very first lines establish a parallel between a road trip taken by Frantz Fanon and my own experience on the same road decades later:

In those opening paragraphs, I essentially use the narration of particular experiences – Fanon’s and my own – as a literary device. An introduction needs a hook, and this one allows me to pull together three things. The first is Fanon’s anecdote, which alerts the reader to the time, the place, and above all, the stakes. The second is my own observation, from which I originally drew dubious conclusions. The third is the metaphor of the road itself, a metaphor which these vignettes provide and which runs through the book. But what analytical work, if any, does this pair of vignettes do? Little, in fact. Most of what it does accomplish is produced by the pairing itself. But the point is that this passage does not answer a question, it poses one, asking not only “how African states exercised their new sovereignties” – with roadblocks, gendarmes, and support for anti-colonial insurgencies – but “how and why in years to come NGO’s would begin to assume functions of [state sovereignty] in a period in which it was so highly valued?”^{Footnote 17} The question that pushes the book is drawn from experience, on which the evidence itself is much less reliant.

In writing the book, I used experience to do rhetorical work as well. In one section, a description of a long-distance bus trip gives way to reflections on the form of power NGOs represent, but the real work of the passage is to bridge two parts of the book, to return to the road metaphor that traverses the text, and to reassert its central questions. One could legitimately ask why another chapter, on political prisoners and Human Rights activism in the 1970s, begins with an account of urban tensions in 1990s Bamako, but the answer ought to become clear in reading the chapter: key texts on which it relies were produced in that period. No less significantly, things I witnessed then and since shape my understanding of how principles of free speech reverberated on the ground in what was then a “donor darling” state. But the argument is precisely that Human Rights in the 1970s looked nothing like Human Rights in the 1990s, and “global governance” seems much too capacious a term for what emerged in the Sahel some four decades ago.