1 - Prologue: My Archive

Summary

“My Archive,” as depicted in this chapter, documents the author’s wealth of experience as a “scholar and researcher, teacher and mentor” in the form of a dialogue with his past to interrogate African studies and, in particular, Yoruba history. With a natural life experience, the author having lived in both colonial and postcolonial Africa, the chapter investigates and interrogates the cultural history of Africa (with focus on the Yoruba) vis-à-vis its evolution into modernity. Autoethnography is noteworthy a narrative of (parts of) self. It is composed of primary sources of two facets – the author’s life works and cultural collections. The archive also, via the latter, interrogates the two colonially imposed eco-political systems of capitalism and socialism as with other cultural impositions and their far-reaching consequences. Each chapter’s categorization is summarized at the latter part of the chapter.