Land, Gender and the Periphery: Themes in the History Eastern and Southern Africa

The study of the African past from a truly African perspective is less than half a century old. It was indeed contemporaneous with the emergence of the continent from colonial rule. In this new effort to redefine their past, historians of Eastern and Southern Africa have registered their fair share of historians of Eastern and Southern Africa have registered their fair share of achievement. The Dar es Salaam School. as to came to be known in the 1960s, was cited on a par with other regional nodes, the Ibadan School in Anglophone West Africa and the Dakar school in the Francophone sector. Likewise, the reconstruction of the African past through a skillful combination of written and oral sources acquired new breadth and depth in other centres of historical research-Nairobi, Makerere and Addis Ababa, to cite only three names. In more recent time historical research with a distinctively economic bias (to the extent of even having a separate Department of Economic History) has been growing in Harare. Nor has this historical research flourished exclusively within strictly national boundaries. Since the 1960s, there have been regional linkages that brought historians of the region together. Even if this might not have resulted in the writing of region together. Even if this might not have resulted in the writing of regional histories, they have contributed in no small measure to sharing of sharing of research methods and results. Thus, in the 1970s, historians had constituted an important contingent within the series of International Congress of Africanists. In the 1970s and 1980s, the Goethe Institute (from its offices, successively, of Nairobi and Addis Ababa) brought together historians of Eastern Africa in a series of conferences. The fifth and last of these conference was held in Ambo (Ethiopia) in 1984. It is a sad fact that, although many high quality papers were presented in those meetings, no publication has ensued from the whole exercise. In the second half of the 1980s, the Organisation for Social Science Research in Eastern and Southern Africa (OSSREA) assumed this role of fostering linkages among the region's historians. Although it had been established with the mission of promoting social science research in general, it came to realise that the growth of social science is contingent on the growth of he various constituent disciplines. History was one of the disciplines that benefited from this commitment. In 1987 and 1988 , two workshops were held in Roma (Lesotho) and Manzini (Swaziland), respectively. An attempt was made to give these contacts an enduring organisational shape with the formation of the Association of Historians of Eastern and Southern Africa even if the effort could not be sustained.