“Apart from the Muslim scholars, most of the region’s inhabitants were not literate and therefore did not produce written documents. Writing the pre-colonial histories of these ‘distant people’ require alternative archives or historical sources beyond the records about them left behind by European outsiders,” Dr. Sarr pointed out.
Dr. Assan, who was speaking on the topic ‘Decolonizing Knowledge: History, Pre-colonial Worldviews and Critical Oral History in The Gambia’ at the symposium tagged – Gambian Cultural Heritage Going Digital, in his paper, explained that this means attention to local sources, which are primarily oral (in nature), “as our own Alice Bellagamba, Joseph Miller and Jan Vansina and many others have noted. Since the late 1950s and 1960s, African oral histories in shaping accurate and meaningful knowledge about the West African past has received a complex and, in some cases, contradictory treatment in much of the recent literature (Green 2018).”
He quickly disclosed that critics of African oral histories offer a long list of problems associated with relying on these sources when writing about pre-colonial African history, and many of these criticisms are compelling –“by their very nature, Tom Spear writes, oral traditions are restricted to generalise and often floating periods within the recent past.”
Those, he said, narratives condense what were likely complex interactions into neat and clear stories that often emphasise group conflicts, cohesion, and or cooperation.
So, “if African historians want to take the study of Africa seriously, they must never ignore African sources of knowledge and for those who study Gambian history, NCAC’s Oral History Archives is a rich depository that can’t be overlooked,” he highlighted.
However, he stated that a careful examination of the oral sources suggests that less Gambians had more nuanced understanding of settlement, land use, and/or politics. “This appears to me that they did not believe that land was vacant because it was unsettled.” And “the land, which was left vacant, was not just untouched; it was because people believed that some invincible spirits owned or occupied it.”
According to him, “as one Alhaji Darboe told Donald Wright in 1974, ‘in those days (referring to an undefined past) beginning with Sika and going as far Essau, it was all covered with trees; there was no bare land.”
