The Read: Trevor Getz, A Primer for Teaching African History
Friday's Child Is Loving and Giving
Why did I get this book?
It’s my field of specialization and I really like how Trevor Getz thinks as a scholar and teacher.
Is it what I thought it was?
Yes. It’s exactly what’s promised and I think more than that, in the sense that it would be easy for it to fall into being purely workmanlike and didactic. But Getz has a keen sense of purpose, aiming not only to help new faculty shape courses on African history but to help faculty in other fields like world or comparative history integrate African material into their teaching. It’s also reflective in a really attractive way about teaching and pedagogy, which is a very hard thing to write about in a way that isn’t technical and remote—Getz uses the lukasa, a Luba court-historian tool that was used in parts of what is now the Democratic Republic of Congo and Zambia.
What continuing uses might I have for it?
Old dogs learn new tricks: it gave me some ideas for courses I’m revising and courses I haven’t taught yet. I’d also be happy to bring it to any teaching-learning conversation as a great model for framing course design and pedagogical choices.
Quotes
“We want to spark the curiosity of our students, train them to think critically about Africa and the world, give them access to the complex patterns of human interactions and the rich experiences of African individuals and societies, and help them make meaning of these brief glimpses into past lives.”
“The design of learning outcomes is not really your initial task. Instead, the first step I recommend…is to study your students. Who are they? What do they bring with them to the class, and what do they not know or understand? What are their expectations for the course, and what are their goals?”
“Like their students, our colleagues often tend to start discussions and comments about the African history course by noting what their students lack…Many instructors were as concerned with students’ preconceptions about Africa as they were their lack of knowledge about the continent and its people.”
“When I first began to teach African history, I took students’ protestations of ignorance about the continent at face value. Yet I quickly learned that nobody comes to the classroom with a tabula rasa.”
“Identity is still with us, and although the term has perhaps lost the power it once had to focus our field, it is still a useful frame through which to talk about the ways that people practice and display their senses of self and their connections to each other.”
Commentary, asides, loose thoughts, unfair complaints
I really appreciated where Getz starts off. Like him, I’ve learned over the years that my students know more than they think they know about African history, and are able to quickly apply what they know about history in other times and places to the study of African history—and that starting from a sense of absence or deficiency put limitations on my own teaching. I think that this is what has dismayed me at times about Africanist historians in general—I used to see it at meetings of the American Historical Association when I still went to them, which is Africanists coming into panels or conversations in a desperately aggrieved manner, upset that specialists in other fields knew nothing about African history, but then imagining that the benchmark for “knowing” was the expertise that Africanists themselves possessed. That’s a self-defeating vision of teaching or engagement—that you hold anyone as deficient if they aren’t as knowledgeable as you are. As Getz observes, not only do students and colleagues know more than they think, what specialists in African history have to offer the rest of the discipline can be usefully unhitched from highly specific mastery of particular places or times—among other things, Africanists have been major methodological innovators within the discipline. It’s true, as Getz points out, that African ways of knowing and African histories have been marginalized within the academy (sometimes even in fields that should be extraordinarily welcoming, like Black Studies) but the answer to that is not painting everybody but the specialist as ignorant.
I’ve said my piece on assessment recently. I appreciate Getz’ sensible approach to talking about learning outcomes but I don’t agree that every outcome should be articulated so that it is concretely measurable, especially not in the time frame of a single course. On some level, yes, if I’m grading student work it’s measurable in some fashion—otherwise, what am I grading? But there are some important goals in teaching African history that aren’t easy to confine to a straightforwardly measurable indicator. Getz takes this on later in the book in talking about ethical thinking as an outcome, so I think we basically agree—but I really think the term “measurable” is ripe for misuse in our present moment.
Getz has a great discussion in an early chapter of why specialists in African history find “tribe” such a vexing word and concept, and why so many of us think so hard about how to teach to it or around it.
Another good conversation in that same chapter is between pedagogies that emphasize content acquisition early in the study of history and the other about developing an intellectual and methodological facility with fashioning historical knowledge into narratives that are compelling and memorable to the student (which may call for much more care about the raw amount of content being covered). I tend to be in the latter camp in my course designs—I want students to begin to make use of African history in how they think about the world and I know that if I cram the course too full of content that they have to know and recall I’m going to get in the way of that. But this is a discussion that goes on every day among professors in History departments (and in other disciplines like English literature). It’s not something to take a doctrinaire or fixed position on.
Chapter Three and Four tackle another difficult choice for people teaching African history, which is how to make its geographies, boundaries and chronologies legible to students. I started my career trying to teach an overall survey of sub-Saharan African history from the earliest times to the present and I quickly decided that was incoherent. It wasn’t the temporal scope that was the problem, it was that it took for granted that “sub-Saharan Africa” was a coherent geographic unit of study across that temporal range. If it’s 1000 CE, then studying the societies of the upper Niger in the same frame as studying Bantu-speaking and Khoisan communities in southern Africa doesn’t make any coherent sense—it’s like trying to fit Olaf Tryggvason in Iceland, the Byzantine conquest of the Bulgarians and the Ismaili emirate in Multan into the same analytic and narrative frame of “Eurasian history” around 1000 CE. You can do it, but it either takes comparative abstractions, a conceptual frame like environmental history or it takes a mind-numbing density of specific political and social information that would fry the brains of most students (and scholars). So you have to make coherent decisions about how to break down the geographic and temporal range of survey courses (and upper-level courses, too) in African history. Getz provides a pretty good guide for doing so. One rule I use that I don’t think he mentions is, “Where’s the action at?”, meaning, where is the most compelling scholarship, archival material, active debates, etc. at the moment? Over time, I’ve shifted some of my courses less because of an underlying conceptual vision and more to historiographies that have become denser and more exciting for undergraduates. It’s a bad idea to choose a coherent geographic and temporal focus that doesn’t have a lot of current scholarship devoted to it.
Getz talks late in the book about the opposition between “coverage” and “uncoverage” in the design of history courses. I’m very very much on team “uncoverage”—this made me think consciously about why that is, and about some of the liabilities that approach has.
Overall, I think this is a lovely overview of the way that any historian—or really, any professor in the humanities and qualitative social sciences—sets out to think through the design of syllabi and the teaching of courses. If you ever find yourself desperate to get someone hostile to academia to understand that we don’t just walk into a classroom and unload brains full of facts and then walk out again, this would be a very concrete, readable way to address that misconception.