The serious study of African history in American and European universities began only in the 1950s, and detailed studies of African experience under colonialism are only now beginning to appear. Two traditions formerly dominant in Western historiography discouraged an earlier concern about Africa. One was a deep ethnocentric bias: history was the study of our past, which emphasized English history in England, French history in France, and American history in the United States. Africa was simply beside the point. And history was also elitist?concerned with those who governed countries, won battles, invented, discovered, and in novated. It was not much interested in the ordinary people of Europe and America, much less of Africa. These beliefs were more serious for colonial Africa than they were for precolonial Africa, when Africans were in charge and their affairs could be emphasized in the same way those of European kings and prime ministers were in European history. But in the colonial period the obvious leaders, those who gave the orders and made policy, were European. Historians following the normal elitist tendencies of the discipline found themselves writing African history of the colonial period without leaving a place for African initiative. Nine-tenths of recent scholarship dealing with the colonial period has to do with the European conquests, European colonial policies, colonial government, economic development plans, and occasionally with the growth of the Western-educated elite that was to take over when the colonial period ended. Next to nothing is said about the way African societies responded to colonial rule, or about the impact of colonial policies on in dividual Africans. This tendency is heightened by the fact that historians are used to working from written sources, and the main written sources for the colonial period are those
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