Article: Origin traditions and history in Central Africa.

Historians using oral traditions must continually grapple with traditions of origin, for unlike scholars of religion, folklore, or ideology, they must determine what is historical and what is legendary in these ancient memories. Yet for Africa these traditions are all that historians have to reconstruct the origins of the societies that they study. Thus, early European historians of central Africa--for example, the great missionary historian Giovanni Antonio Cavazzi da Montecuccolo, who wrote Angolan history in the mid-seventeenth century (Cavazzi 1687)--anchored their research in oral traditions. (1) Historians working during the early colonial period used oral tradition ...

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