Abstract
African studies has gone through three well-known phases as a field of study.
Up until 1950 or thereabouts, those studying Africa — they were not yet called
Africanists — tended to concentrate almost exclusively on the capturing (or
recapturing) of a description of Africa eternal: Launcelot the ethnographer in
search of a holy grail of the past that was written in the present tense and was
undefiled by contact and uncorrupted by civilization. What was once a myth is now
a fairy tale and it would be silly to waste time tellling each other the obvious
truth that fairy tales are modes of the social control and the education of
children.
Publisher
Cambridge University Press (CUP)