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Thoughts on Dahomey - Part 1
- Thread starter AndyC
- Start date
Fascinating stuff
- Pronouns
- he/him
Many thanks to Andy both for adding the photos and for editing it in such a way that you can't notice that I can neither spell nor construct coherent sentences. He really does improve these articles a lot.
- Location
- Derbyshire
Really glad to see this starting. You're right that Africa, especially pre-colonial Africa, is a very neglected area in AH, but then that's at least partially due to the lack of good online sources.
- Pronouns
- he/him
It's one of those things where my university worker privilege helps me out massively. There's a lot of excellent stuff I can read for free on JSTOR and the uni's personal online library.
In particular I am a huge fan of the work Edna Bey is doing for Emory University. She's released a huge number of books, papers and collaborations about West Africa and changing social roles within it over the last 20 years that's both groundbreaking and fascinating.
I don't agree with her on everything (I think she's too cavalier in dismissing anything pre 1700 in the oral histories as constructed myths) but of the 12 or so writers about the region I've read, she's by far the best. You read something by Alpern or Akinjogbin and then the same information comes up in Bey and she recontextualises it in interesting ways (in particular the way she argued that the smallpox vodun cult rather than being a death cult was actually a veiled way of showing resistance to the monarchy because smallpox tended to be what secretly murdered kings were claimed to be have died of, was a genuinely imaginative way of linking two pieces of data I already had in a way that I hadn't thought of).