The Children of Woot: Inheritance and Legacy

Extract

To define precisely the boundaries of a book review, a review article, and an article which draws on a book for its themes would seem to propose nice, indeed over-nice, questions; and what is over-nice tends to become nasty. If we seek to contextualize the term “book review” by insisting on the prior causality of an editor who selects both book and reviewer, this is not a book review at all, which is as well, as it would suggest an outrageous delay if a book published in 1978 were reviewed now. Nor is this even a review article, since I am not so much considering Jan Vansina’s The Children of Woot for its own valuable content, namely a discussion of the evidence for the history of the Kuba of Zaire, but rather as a jumping-off ground for reflections on two quite separate topics, the validity of historical knowledge as such, and the possibilities for development available to African societies in the pre-colonial era. The flavour that New Blackfriars has developed over the years comes surely from the recognition by successive editors of the areas of interplay of the sacred, the scholarly, and (in a very wide sense) the political as a primary focus, perhaps the primary focus. This encourages me to claim that Vansina’s suggestion (p. 242) that “the Kuba past consisted of more than events concerning a few people in a corner of the tropical woods” can be given a wider range than even he might intend.