Wikipedia:Colonial sources and Africa

You want to write an article on a topic involving Africa but sources are scarce. You happen upon a book written by someone called Archibald Huntingdon in 1905, and it’s available on Internet Archive! You start reading, and you think to yourself "hey this is pretty racist, but if I censor some of the language it should be good to use". Here’s where you’re wrong:

Age matters

See also: WP:AGEMATTERS

These sources are old. This means they are much more likely to adhere to debunked theories (such as that of biological race) and don't incorporate/consider the mountains of research done over the past half-century (see African historiography), including archaeological, linguistical etc. One common narrative up until the 1960s was that Africans welcomed colonial rule as an end to anarchy and destructive warfare. Practically all of African history has been revised, often multiple times and sometimes very recently.

They're racist

Yep, you probably knew this one, but it runs deeper than merely language. One factor is racist tropes, such as the noble savage, the savage cannibals, the "Dark Continent", "wild Africa", and many more; these are harder to always notice and, since they're baked into the text, much harder to root out. There are also racist theories such as the Hamitic hypothesis based on the belief that all social complexity, states, and technologies found in sub-Saharan Africa had to have derived from interactions, usually conquests, with "civilised" peoples. They also deprecated oral tradition, which was how Africans recorded their history, excluding African perspectives and treating them as objects under the pretence of white supremacism. No matter how much an editor is alive to the source's positive bias, use of it will always result in a partial and very POV account. The sources thus both tend to be racist in what they include and what they exclude. Ultimately, it's nigh on impossible to use such a source without propagating a racist worldview. But they only represent the views of their time, yes and it isn't the 19th/early 20th century, in 2025/X, like with other works written by white supremacists, these sources are WP:FRINGE.

The authors aren’t credible

Due to the belief that Africa was ahistorical, few professional historians paid attention to it. In the early colonial period, most works were written by ex-members of the colonial regime, and weren't independent of their topic. They also sometimes incorporated colonial mythology, such as Prester John or Ophir. In the second half of the colonial period, colonial/imperial history entered the fringe of the profession. Colonial historians based their work solely on archives, which were treated uncritically. These were written by colonisers with strong incentives for spin to justify their colonial conquests (if the book dates between 1870 and 1914, it was written during the Scramble for Africa, one such casus belli was the "civilising mission") or to justify continuing colonial rule (such as the narrative that colonial rule was necessary to keep order over "barbarous tribes"). Anthropological study was pursued in order for governments to better understand how to control their subjects.

So when is it okay to use these sources?

Hopefully never, they are best handled by experts. They're fine for quotes from themselves, potentially for non-human topics such as physical geography and botany, and on occasion for data (although probably not casualty counts). If there had to be an arbitrary cut-off point to simplify things, 1970 seems reasonable to some (later for South African topics), but it's best practice to assess each source on its own merits. The newer the better; within the colonial period approaches to African history gradually changed, so a 1950s/60s journal article is much more usable than a 1920s one. If you’re unsure about a source, take it to WP:RSN. If you’re confident in your ability to analyse sources and have familiarity with African historiography, potentially you can use an old source on a case-by-case basis. But generally if you can't find recent sources on the topic to satisfy WP:SIGCOV, don't write about it.

Indigenous sources

Since this is technically on colonial-era sources, it'd be remiss not to discuss the indigenous sources of this time. Some of these continue to hold authority on their topics, such as Jacob Egharevba's A Short History of Benin or Samuel Josia Ntara's Mbiri ya Achewa, and they can be very useful for information on oral traditions. However others served as proto-nationalist propaganda in the anti-colonial struggle, so caution is advised.

See also

• WP:RAJ