History as a Living Reality – The Ibadan School and Historiographical Continuity as a Decolonisation of Africa’s Past

This article analyses some of the works of the Ibadan school of historiography with the aim of showing how, in a context of African nationalisms, they intended to give historio-graphical legitimacy to African historical consciousness. On the one hand, this revealed the extent to which historiography until then had not only written a partial history but was also an ideological dispositif of domination. On the other, it attempted to establish a histo-riographical continuity with both African oral traditions and with non-academic histories written by the Nigerian Christian elite since the 1870s. This article will highlight how one of the most interesting legacies of the Ibadan school was the unresolved issue that, while the writing of history, both academic and non-academic, connected the African past to a universal history, placing it in conversation with other human experiences, it also discon-nected the oral tradition from the sense of history it had expressed in its own context of production.