Jan Vansina helped to launch a thinnish (by subsequent standards) History in Africa in 1974 with an essay on his own early – and ongoing – work on possible Kuba pasts. Vansina’s artful conversion of a potential confession of error to a memorable reflection on what are, in effect, the historical dynamics of the profession of history itself, challenged his successors in the marginally documented mists of Africa’s nineteenth-century past, and earlier, at the highest levels of the historian’s craft. Twenty years later, the half-way point to the present occasion, David Henige chose a different forum to lament the essay’s apparent descent into obscurity, implicitly including the by-then very ample pages of his own “journal of method.”^{Footnote 1} As a somewhat less directly active co-conspirator in this journal, but always committed to the potential of thinking systematically about history in Africa as inspiration for the profession as a whole,^{Footnote 2} this reflective anniversary issue seems an instance appropriate for further thoughts on method, not as a technical manual but as a frame of mind.

Vansina in 1974 was in the process of revising his early (1963) history of the Kuba (in Flemish) toward what was becoming The Children of Woot. ^{Footnote 3}Woot was a much more nuanced “tour de force” of historical reconstruction from the diverse academic disciplines of what he had contributed mightily to creating as “the decathlon of the social sciences,” as Wyatt MacGaffey put it in another memorable moment from this journal.^{Footnote 4} The specific historical conclusions about the Kuba were significantly revised – population antecedents to the north rather than the west, the possible implications of maize cultivation replacing sorghum as the agricultural base, and other aspects of the social and economic contexts of the earlier version’s emphasis on the Kuba political dynasty, as the centering of the “children” in the title of the subsequent monograph consolidated.

But these specifics aren’t my concern here. Nor is Vansina’s unpretentious ability to define a field, then to continue to watch and think it through further as colleagues and students struggled to come to terms with his lead, and eventually return to destroy his own original delineation with new characterizations synthesizing it all, as he was doing there. His practice of what he preached in this essay has revised himself on “kingdoms” in general, and on the Tyo, Rwanda, and the Kuba in particular. Rather, the inspiration that has guided me, and that I trust History in Africa’s new editors to inspire in their contributors, is the epistemological argument central to the essay, to which I allude in my own sequence of titles above.

What I have taken from Vansina’s demonstration of the intellectual power of “systematic doubt” is humility as a historian. The operational lesson is the productivity of refusing, ever, to concede a level of certainty beyond provisional to any “conclusion” that a historian might suspect. Uncertainty is motivating. It opens us to anomalies and inconsistencies in the evidence we have and drives us to imagine possible associations between what we’re confidently aware that we don’t know and the random input that comes along in the course of teaching or working on other projects or in our ongoing daily experiences. Every hypothesis is only a working one, a heuristic convenience, and every solution – provided that it’s treated as tentative – generates new questions to answer and provokes a quest for new methods or evidence to fill the ongoing gaps that it reveals. The examples on which Vansina reflected from his own experience with the Kuba started with oral traditions, led to historical linguistics and archaeology, and on through sociological modeling and biology. Recall the titles I have provided for this essay.

As for myself, sociological modeling has become a principal focus of my own doubts. Sociological models – and that’s properly “sociological” with a small “s,” meant to include all that the French count among “les sciences humaines,” or the Germans in the “Sozialwissenschaften” – are, as Vansina emphasized, epistemologically necessary for historians, but only as consumers. What we cannot try to do, indeed absolutely should not attempt, is reduce the past to their prescribed terms, selecting evidence to confirm our a priori modeling. Ironically (but what is history, if not irony?), sociological models were the necessary bridges across which historians charged fifty years ago to plunge into Africa’s past, since at that initial foray into the field we had no evidence to speak of, or didn’t recognize what we had for what we might make of it. Hence we were free to imagine what “must have been” in Africa’s past and fit the scattered bits of evidence that we had into the (modern) models we slapped on unsuspecting Africans of the past; Vansina’s “kingdoms” were one of those useful working hypotheses, and even today, long after he moved on from them, texts and even monographs remain dominated by “states” and their phantom negations, so-called “stateless societies.” But abstractions highlight only the logic of static structures, while history is principally about dynamic dialectical processes of experience, motivation, strategic actions, and the responses they necessarily provoke. Some models will always bear revealingly on any moment, and historians need them to sense possible relationships among the components of a historical context, but we should never take them as more than a possible perspective on a limited aspect of an infinitely complex past, and then take this glimpse of validity as a viable starting point on which to build further doubt.

David Henige is a devotee of doubt par excellence, and in only forty years through History in Africa he has managed to challenge a productive portion of what historians had thought they knew about Africa, and well beyond. The specifics don’t matter, as they are all provisional anyway. More important, the journal has midwifed the current, often quite sophisticated awareness among historians of Africa of noting, and distrusting, any assumptions of their own that they bring to their fields. All historians come with baggage of that sort, of course (and that’s a good thing, as I may find another occasion to explain), but the urgency of systematic doubt is particularly acute for History in Africa, since the gap beween us, now, and them, in the past, is far deeper than the evidence itself and extends to the conceptual frameworks by which we even recognize anything as such. Historians in every field have to make the conventional leap into the minds of people in the past, who by definition were unlike ourselves, but historians working on Africa, by definition trained in modern institutions of higher education and communicating through scholarly networks composed of the abstractions of modernity, must take an additional leap into an experiential world that they have been trained since childhood to ignore, or marginalize. One proceeds with confidence only at one’s peril.

The respect for evidence on which Vansina insisted, because it has the inconveniently stimulating ability to create doubt, to raise questions that researchers could never have imagined on their own, to surprise, has left me dedicated to restoring a querulously historical epistemology – a historiology – to a practice that (as he noted in passing) has veered repeatedly into the indubitably comfortable world of the familiar and away from history’s proper speculations on motivations, why particular people in particular past moments might have done the – at first glance – inexplicable things they did.