Oral history in any form is unacceptable to the hardliners trained in the Rankean tradition which places enormous premium on the ‘primary sources’. Anything else is the second best, and the oral testimony is, of course, the worst. To the literate culture of the modern West, anything which is not written did not exist. Hence, Hegel declared in 1831 that Africa ‘is not historical part of the world’.

As late as 1965, Hugh Trevor-Roper stated that Africa had no history. He said that ‘Perhaps in the future there will be some African history to teach. At the present there is none, or very little: there is only the history of Europeans in Africa’. As for the value of the oral sources for writing history, A.J.P. Taylor firmly announced: ‘In this matter, I am an almost total skeptic.

Old men drooling about their youth? No!’ Besides these extreme reactions, there are those who are doubtful towards this exercise because its form is imprecise, chronology is uncertain, the data are unsupported and it can be practiced only at a very small scale.

There is a creative tension which oral history faces in its efforts to produce history which can equal the document-based history in richness. Even those advocating the use of oral sources concede that there are certain problems involved in it. Thus, Eric Hobsbawm writes that ‘most oral history today is personal memory, which is a remarkably slippery medium for preserving facts.

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The point is that memory is not so much a recording as a selective mechanism, and the selection is, within limits, constantly changing’. He argues that the importance of such history is not just to record facts but to understand the mentalities of people, to know ‘what ordinary people remember of big events as distinct from what their betters think they should remember, or what historians can establish as having happened; and insofar as they turn memory into myth, how such myths are formed’.

Even though this suggestion is important as it lifts oral history above the routine work of ‘checking the reliability of the tapes of old ladies and gentlemen’s reminiscences’, it dampens the enthusiasm of oral historians to rival their traditional counterparts. It is true that oral history has now acquired an independent status insofar as it is no longer a recording activity but a historiographical practice in its own right. It succeeds in those where it has failed.