Oral history

Lore & Background

The term oral history was coined or popularized by historian Allan Nevins in the 1940s, not by Joe Gould. Gould, a homeless man living in New York City, solicited donations by claiming that he was working on a massive manuscript called 'An Oral History of Our Time', which he said consisted of thousands of recorded conversations on various topics. Although he was known to have a history of mental illness and violence, Gould was beloved by some writers in Greenwich Village, including Ezra Pound and E. E. Cummings. However, excerpts supposedly from his 'Oral History' were later revealed to be largely fabricated or nonexistent, and a profile in The New Yorker focused on his claims rather than validating the work's existence.

One of the earliest academic oral

Reader's Guide

Oral history has become an international movement in historical research, partly attributed to the development of information technology, which allowed a method rooted in orality to contribute to research, particularly the use of personal testimonies made in a wide variety of public settings. Oral historians have discovered the endless possibilities of posting data and information on the Internet, making them readily available to scholars, teachers, and ordinary people, reinforcing the viability of oral history since the new modes of transmission allowed history to get off archival shelves and reach the larger community.

According to the Columbia Encyclopedia, the accessibility of tape recorders in the 1960s and 1970s led to oral documentation of the era's movements and protests. Following this, oral history has increasingly become a respected record type. Some oral historians now also account for the subjective memories of interviewees due to the research of Italian historian Alessandro Portelli and his associates.

Oral histories are also used in many communities to document the experiences of survivors of tragedies. Following the Holocaust, there has emerged a rich tradition of oral history, particularly of Jewish survivors. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum has an extensive archive of over 70,000 oral history interviews. Oral history as a discipline has fairly low barriers to entry, so it is an act in which laypeople can readily participate. In his book Doing Oral History, Donald Ritchie wrote that 'oral history has room for both the academic and the layperson. With reasonable training... anyone can conduct a useable oral history.'

Did You Know?

• The term 'oral history' is believed to originate with Joe Gould, a homeless man in New York City who claimed to be working on a manuscript called 'An Oral History of Our Time'.
• Columbia University's Oral History Research Office, established in 1948 by Professor Allan Nevins, is the oldest and largest organized oral history program in the world.
• StoryCorps, a well-known oral history organization in the United States, interviews subjects by people they know, in contrast to the scholarly tradition.

The Living Archive of Oral Tradition

In most African societies, the primary vehicle for preserving collective memory was not the written page but the spoken word. Oral historians—ranging from professional specialists like the West African griots to more informal keepers of memory such as the Kuba bulaam, or "men of memory"—served as the custodians of a community's past. Within the cosmological framework of these societies, history was understood not as a detached sequence of events but as a living process woven into the relationship between people, their environment, the divine, and their ancestors. The historical process was fundamentally communal: eyewitness testimony, hearsay, personal reminiscences, and even visionary experiences were shaped into narrative traditions that were performed, often with musical accompaniment, and passed down through successive generations. These traditions took the form of formal epics, everyday narratives, and highly formulaic poetry memorized word for word. Far from being mere entertainment, they functioned as socially consolidated histories that defined group identity, forged sociocultural alliances, embedded political authority, and provided the foundation for religious ideology. In stateless societies, clan histories held particular prominence.

Challenging the Outsider's Pen

For centuries, the written record of African history was dominated by non-African voices, each carrying their own set of assumptions and prejudices. European explorers and chroniclers from the fifteenth century onward tended to project an exoticized, primitive image of the continent, often steeped in Christian and racial bias. Colonial-era scholarship went further, advancing Eurocentric frameworks and racist theories such as the Hamitic hypothesis to justify domination. It was not until the mid-twentieth century that African historiography coalesced as an organized field, and its earliest project was largely one of refutation—systematically dismantling the narratives imposed by colonial powers. Nationalist histories then emerged with the dual aim of cultivating patriotism and holding together the multi-ethnic nation-states that independence had created. As growing pessimism about the continent's economic and political future set in, Marxist analytical tools gained currency, sharpening the critical lens through which colonialism and its aftermath were examined. By the twenty-first century, the discipline had shed much of its earlier ideological rigidity, adopting a more pluralist orientation and turning its attention increasingly toward contemporary rather than precolonial history.

A Multidisciplinary Methodology

Because most African societies recorded their past through oral tradition rather than written documents, the historiography of the continent developed a distinctive methodological character. Where other regional historiographies could rely heavily on archival texts, African scholars had to build their frameworks around the careful utilization of oral sources, treating community traditions as contemporary documents carrying messages from the past. This necessity drove the discipline toward a genuinely multidisciplinary approach, incorporating evidence from archaeology, historical linguistics, and a range of other auxiliary fields. Even the written sources that do exist—Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphic records dating to around 1580 BCE, Geʽez inscriptions from the Aksumite period, Arabic chronicles by scholars such as al-Masudi and Ibn Battuta, and Ajami-language works from West Africa and the Swahili coast—often themselves drew upon oral material. Texts like the Kilwa, Timbuktu, and Kano Chronicles were essentially literary transcriptions of spoken tradition. Meanwhile, vast repositories such as the Istanbul archives and North African national collections remained largely unexplored, underscoring how much of the continent's documentary past still awaits systematic study.

Institutional Struggles and the Question of "Africa" Itself

The institutional landscape of African historiography has been marked by persistent challenges. In the 1980s, universities across the continent grappled with severe economic and political crises, and the resulting instability prompted a significant migration of scholars, many of whom relocated to the United States. The discipline remains critically underfunded to this day, a structural weakness that limits research capacity and the training of new generations of historians. On a more conceptual level, the very idea of "Africa" as a unified historical subject is itself a contested inheritance. The intellectual Valentin Mudimbe observed that the concept was originally constructed and deployed by non-Africans, particularly Europeans. It was later appropriated by diasporic Africans during nineteenth-century abolitionist movements, who, removed from the continent, could perceive it as a whole and sought an "African homeland." For most people on the continent, however, a unified African identity was forged not through abstract intellectual categories but through the shared, lived experience of colonial rule and the collective resistance to it—an experience that planted the roots of pan-Africanist thought.

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