AFRICA'S "HISTORY "
SIR,—Mr. Vernon Bartlett's letter is a kindly one, and I am sorry if I misinterpreted him in any way. But even if one accepts the somewhat restricted Oxford Dictionary defini- tion of " history " which he quotes," a written narrative constituting a continuous methodical record," it is still not the case that Africans have no history. There are such written narratives. If one considers only African history written by Africans (and excludes the important contributions of . Arab historians), there are, for example, Abderrahman Es-Sadi's Tarikh es-Sudan, Mahmud Hati's Tarikh el-Fettah, Ahmed Ibn Fartua's History of the First Twelve Years of the Reign of Mai Idris Aloma of Bornu, the Kano Chronicle, the Chronicles of Walata and Nema, and a long list of untranslated Arabic MSS., mainly local chronicles, preserved in the Paris Bibliotheque Nationale and other libraries—not to mention the manuscripts still in the keeping of West African learned and holy men. Not as much as one would like, nor covering as wide an area of Africa south of the Sahara as one would like, I agree: but " history," in the Oxford Dictionary sense, for all that.—Yours faithfully,
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