Editorial: To Our Readers

Abstract

Ahistoricism is a charge that would snugly fit much of the current scholarship on West Africa. Yet a deep and discerning historical dimension is what interpretations of the region need most at this crucial juncture of ambiguous social and political transformations. In this regard, Olufemi Taiwo’s piece, “Prophets without Honour: African Apostles of Modernity in the Nineteenth Century,” hits several relevant targets with one shot. Apart from his critical revisionist reading of three distinguished nineteenth-century West African theorists and advocates of modernity, Taiwo simultaneously pulls the rug under much of the current discussion of West African modernity conducted as if it were a new subject in the region, and programmatically reminds us what we should never have forgotten in the first place. Part of the lesson here for the field at large is that those who don’t do history will be condemned to the needless enervation of energy reinventing the wheel, rather than the much-needed continuous refinement and extension.