The leading American Historical Review published a special issue in which it published five large articles under the general title "African History Today "(1983, N 4). Such attention to the past of a distant continent is not accidental. It is primarily caused by general reasons - the growing role of African countries in the modern world, progressive socio - economic, political and cultural changes taking place in them.

The interest of US bourgeois science in the past and present of African peoples is, of course, far from disinterested. Scientific expansion and the export of bourgeois ideology and methodology remain one of the main directions of US foreign policy towards developing countries in Africa. This is evidenced, for example, by the report to the US Congress on the 1981 trip of the scientific adviser to the American president to Kenya, Nigeria, Senegal, and Zimbabwe .1 Calls for further intensification of ideological penetration in Africa are constantly heard from the pages of influential organs of the bourgeois press .2
Among other reasons for the development of American African studies, we can mention the increased interest of a significant part of the Black population of the United States in their distant past and their ancestral homeland-Africa. Finally, there is another private reason why the journal of the American Historical Association devoted an entire issue to African topics for the first time in many years of its existence: in 1983, the association's president was a prominent African scholar, F. B. Smith. Kartinov, Professor of the University named after him. Johns Hopkins in Baltimore.

Reading the articles in this issue of the journal provides an opportunity to get acquainted with trends in modern African studies in the United States, to get an idea of the main directions, topics, source base of research and methodological searches of African historians.

Both the journal's articles and the article-by-article bibliography indicate an increase in publications on African history, expanding the geographical scope and chronological scope of research: by the end of the 70s, there were 600 African historians in the United States, compared to just over ten in the mid-50s3 . Currently, the Association for African Studies has more than 2 thousand members, and it should be noted that back in 1969, the Association of African Studies was founded. it split and a more radical wing emerged, forming the Association for the Study of African Heritage. The works of American Africanists are published in more than 100 journals in the United States4 .

The articles published in this issue of the American Historical Review are devoted to various topics and regions of the continent. They consider the following issues:-

1 Science, Technology and American Diplomacy 1981. Second Annual Report Submitted to the Congress by the President. Washington. 1981, pp. 9 - 25.

2 Ottaway D. Africa: U. S. Policy Eclipse. -Foreign Affairs, 1980, vol. 58, N 3.

3 The Past Before Us. Contemporary Historical Writing in the United States. Ithaca -Lnd. 1980, p. 114.

4 Ibid., p. 118; see also: Nikishova I. N. Afrikanistika v SSHA [African Studies in the USA], Peoples of Asia and Africa, 1982, No. 2.

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The article discusses a long-standing discussion about the African slave trade and its social consequences, social relations in the Congo basin at the end of the 19th century, the situation of slaves on the east coast of Africa at the beginning of the 20th century, the motives of anti-colonial protest in Mozambique folk songs, and finally, the historiography of the formation of Afrikaners ' national identity in South Africa. These diverse and diverse articles should be considered from the general point of view of the latest trends in the historical science of the United States, the characteristic features of which are fully reflected in the works on the history of Africa. These are mainly searches in the field of scientific research methods - improving the tools of cognition of the past, attracting new sources/applying quantitative methods.

Historiographic generalization of the results already obtained has been widely developed. P. Manning's historiographical review "The Contours of Slavery and Social Changes in Africa"is characteristic in this regard. Based on the analysis of numerous recent literature, his own archival research and fieldwork in West Africa, the author attempts to summarize the long discussion about the slave trade in Africa. Specifically, we are talking about the number of slaves removed from there over four centuries, geography and, above all, the social consequences of the slave trade. In the author's opinion, two trends collide in the interpretation of this problem. Representatives of the former-the well-known English scholar-Africanist and publicist B. Davidson and the Guyanese historian W. Rodney, who worked for a number of years as a professor at the University of Tanzania, believed that the slave trade brought incalculable disasters to Africa and delayed its socio-economic and cultural progress for a long time (p.837). The second trend is apologetic in nature and is represented by the works of English and American authors. Professor J. D. Smith of the University of Birmingham. Feige put forward the thesis that the slave trade did not exceed the demographic growth of the population and therefore did not significantly affect the social institutions of Africans .5 More recently, the American Africanist J. Miller, trying to support this concept, put forward the thesis that natural and environmental disasters (droughts, diseases and famine) had a stronger impact on the reduction of the population of Africa and led to greater social consequences than the slave trade .6
All participants in the discussion, Manning goes on to say, recognize the dynamism of pre-colonial African societies. However, when studying the internal and external factors of this dynamic, bourgeois historians absolutize some of its aspects to the detriment of others, mechanically contrasting them with each other. Manning is trying to take a more balanced approach. He criticizes Feige for his superficial attitude to digital data, his inability to track changes in the age and gender composition of slaves sold, and differences in geographical regions.

Manning's article contains many interesting facts and figures. Thus, the author believes that only on the west coast of Africa during the XVIII century, 12 million people were captured as slaves, 6 million of them were taken to America, 4 million remained in the position of domestic slaves in Africa itself, and 2 million died. These data refute the calculations of the apologists of the slave trade and generally correspond to the data given in the works of Marxist historians .7
The author does not indicate that the discussion about the African slave trade was caused not so much by Feige's article, but by the works of F. Kartina, performed in the context of the " new economic history "using quantitative methods. 8 It is from Them that supporters of apologetic views draw material for their own ideas.

5 См. Fage J. D. Slavery and the Slave Trade in the Context of West African History. - Journal of African History, 1969, N 3.

6 Miller J. C. The Significance of Drought, Disease, and Famine in the Agriculturally Marginal Zones of West-Central Africa. -Ibid., 1982, N 1. Miller is the author of a book on the early history of Angola (see: Miller J. C. The Importance of Disease, Disease, and Famine in the Agriculturally Marginal Zones of West-Central Africa). Kings and kindred. Early Mbundu States in Angola, M. 1984).

7 Abramova S. Yu. Africa: four centuries of Slave Trade, Moscow, 1978, p. 98.

8 Curtin P. D. The Atlantic Slave Trade. A Census. Madison. 1969; ejusd. Economic Change in Precolonial Africa. Senegambia in the Era of the Slave Trade. Vol. 1 - 2, Madison. 1975.

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subjectivist constructions. Marxist historians 9 and representatives of African historiography 10 critically evaluated the concept of Painting . Among the most active supporters of the Project are J. Miller, an associate professor at the University of Virginia, and P. Lovejoy, a professor at York University in Canada .11
Despite the plentiful data gathered in the latest works of historians and original individual comments, the overall theoretical result of the article under review is low. The social consequences of the slave trade for Africa, according to the author, are as follows: the spread of female labor and polygamy, the development of two types of slavery in Africa itself, the emergence and then rapid impoverishment of the African merchant class, and finally the strengthening of the slave trade on the eve of the colonial division of the continent (p. 839). And not a word is said about the more important results, such as the bloody internecine wars, the devastation of vast areas, the irreparable human losses and, ultimately, the economic and cultural backwardness of the African peoples. This theoretical poverty, coupled with an abundance of factual material, is explained not only by the compromise position of the author, who tries to reconcile progressive, anti-colonialist historiography with an apologetic interpretation of the problem. This is primarily due to Manning's ideological and methodological views expressed in his previous work: a few approving words about Marxism are drowned out in praise of bourgeois objectivism and calls for the de-ideologization of African historiography .12
The three articles in this collection can be conditionally combined using a similar source base - oral sources about events that took place in Kenya, Zaire, and Mozambique. In a brief overview, it is not possible to talk in detail about the" oral " history that is now widely spread abroad. Recently, the newspaper Le Monde announced a "revolution" in methods of cognition of the past, linking it to the widespread use of oral sources .13 Oral history was discussed as one of the main methodological problems at the XV International Congress of Historical Sciences in 1980. Oral sources are increasingly recognized by American historians in general and by American Africanists in particular .14
An article written on the basis of oral sources by a research associate of the University named after V. I. Abramovich. Jones Hopkins P. Romero-Kartin is thematically adjacent to Manning's article, since it deals with African slavery. Surveys were conducted in 1980-1982 on the East African island of Lamu (off the coast of Kenya) mainly among women-former slaves and their owners, social relations, everyday life, customs, psychology, religion were studied. Social life is presented "from within" and "from below" with many details that eluded scientists who worked only with written sources. The article does not claim to be a broad generalization, but it is interesting with facts and live observations.

For Africa, the issue of slavery is not only a topic of academic debate, but in many parts of the continent it is a reality today. In Mauritania, for example, a tenth of the population is still enslaved .15 Lamu Island has recently been the site of a slave trade, and the wealth of the upper class is still growing.

9 Abramova S. Yu. Uk. soch., pp. 115, 175, 179; Suret-Canale J. Reflexions sur quelques problemes d'histoire de l'Afrique. - La Pensee, 1980, N 212, pp. 107 - 111.

10 Uzoigwe G. N. The Slave Trade and African Societies. - Transactions of the Historical Society of Ghana, 1973, N 2; Forced Migration. The Impact of the Export Slave Trade of African Societies. Lnd. 1982, pp. 15 - 29.

11 Miller J. C. Mortality in the Atlantic Slave Trade. Statistical Evidence on Causality. - Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 1981, N 3; Lovejcy P. The Volume of the Atlantic Slave Trade; A Synthesis. - Journal of African History, 1982, N 4.

12 Manning P. Notes Toward a Theory of Ideology in Historical Writing on Modern Africa. -Canadian Journal of African Studies, 1974, N 2.

13 Le Monde, 10.II.1984.

14 См.: The Past Before Us, pp. 391 - 407; The African Piast Speaks. Essays on Oral Tradition and History. Folkestone. 1980. D. Henige, an American African historian and professor at the University of Wisconsin, has convincingly shown that oral sources are highly subjective and often unreliable (see Henige D. P. The Chronology of Oral Tradition. Quest for Chimera. Oxford. 1974; ejusd. Oral Historiography. N. Y. 1982).

15 Morning Star, 12.VIII.1981; Le Monde, 1.VIII.1984.

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the local population was created by slave labor on plantations. This labor was hard and exhausting, taking six days a week (p. 866-867), and the slaves were subjected to severe punishments (p.876). The testimonies of numerous informants cited in the article refute the claims of those who idealize African slavery. However, it is difficult to agree with the author when he clearly exaggerates the social stability of a society built on slavery (p. 882). Even in places as isolated from the outside world as Lamu, new life was beginning to creep in.

R. Harms, an assistant professor at Yale University, in his article "The August Wars", also based on oral sources that he collected in the middle reaches of the Congo (in Zaire) in 1975-1976, seeks to study social relations among fishermen from the Nunu tribe in the late XIX - early decades of the XX century. The article is subtitled "The Diagonal Narrative in African History", and this somewhat unusual phrase expresses the author's theoretical search. At the beginning of the article, he writes at length about the advantages and disadvantages of two methods of cognition of the past: vertical, diachronic (considering the dynamics of events in chronological order) and horizontal, synchronic (studying the structural and functional connections of a historical phenomenon over a significant space) (pp. 809-817).

The latter method, in the author's opinion, was most successfully applied by F. Braudel in his famous essay on the Mediterranean countries in the late Middle Ages 16 . However, in the further arguments of the author of the article and his conclusions, one can clearly trace the influence of another French scientist, E. Leroy-Laduri, who emphasized the determining role of the demographic factor in the historical process.

The diagonal slice is, as Harms writes, a combination of the best qualities of the two methods mentioned above. To achieve this, it is necessary to include human "choice" in the horizontal chain of functional relations (among them Harms names ritual, war, class structure, technology, natural environment, limited resources) and then arrange this material chronologically (p.829).

Using this "new" method, the author tries to study the little-known past of fishermen-nunu. Using oral recollections of the oldest members of the community, Harms analyzes "diagonally" only one social phenomenon-the so-called August wars, which took place at Nunu quite regularly during the dry season of the year. These bloody clashes were fought over the ownership of buried areas formed with the help of dams when the river floods. The author believes that these wars were equally beneficial for both rich and poor relatives (p.833), allegedly because mutual destruction reduced the population density to an optimal level and thereby reduced social tension. The elderly participants of these massacres interviewed by the historian appear in the article as real neo-Malthusians (p. 825).

These are briefly the rather poor and controversial theoretical generalizations obtained with the help of the "diagonal narrative". A purely demographic explanation of such a complex social phenomenon as war in an early class society leads to one-sided conclusions. Kharms ' views are generally characterized by vulgar economism17 . In fact, Nuno's story has remained as mysterious since this article appeared as it was before.

Oral sources are also used to write an article by researchers L. Weil and L. White (from the University of Virginia and the University of York). The object of their attention

16 Braudel's influence on U.S. historical scholarship has been growing in recent years. He is named after the State University of New York Center for the Study of Economics, Historical Systems, and Civilizations, which opened in 1977 (see Kinser S. Annaliste Paradigm? The Geohistorical Structuralism of Fernand Braudel. - American Historical Review, 1981, N 1). African historians actively participated in the discussion of the school of "Annals" and the Braudel method (see: Clarence-Smith W. G. For Braudel: A Note on the Ecole des Annales and the Historiography of Africa. - History in Africa, 1977, N 4; Vansina J. For Oral Tradition (but not against Braudel). - Ibid., 1978, N 5).

17 See also: Harms R. River of Wealth, River of Sorrow. The Central Zaire Basin in the Era of the Slave and Ivory Trade, 1500 - 18Э1, New Haven. 1981.

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This was the beginning of the ideology of anti-colonial resistance among the peasants of Mozambique in the 30-50s of the XX century. The source base of their work is 200 folk songs collected in three different regions of the country. These songs - a kind of political ditties or epigrams-are very common among many peoples of South Africa and carry certain historical information. They are a peculiar way of criticizing the authorities and during the colonial period were a form of passive resistance to the colonial yoke .18 The authors analyzed not only those songs that spontaneously emerged in the peasant environment, but also those performed by professional folk music ensembles - migodo.

The main themes of folk poetry are hatred of the leaders appointed by the colonialists, complaints about heavy forced labor (pp. 892-895). Many songs were directly directed against the Portuguese colonialists, denouncing their violence and arbitrariness. This form of resistance was especially common in the lower Zambezi region, where capitalist-type estates existed and where, after the 1942 circular issued by the colonial authorities, peasants were required to work on sugar plantations for at least 6 months a year (p. 898). These songs often discussed and ridiculed individual colonialists by name.

The article concludes with a conclusion about the birth of the national identity of African peoples reflected in the collected songs (p. 918). We can agree with this. But, following the latest concepts of bourgeois African studies, the authors equate two types of African reactions to colonial conquest-resistance and adaptation, which blurs the fundamental difference between fighters against oppression and those who have taken the path of betrayal. Meanwhile, even the empirical material presented in the article shows the contemptuous attitude of the lower classes of the people towards the servants of the colonialists.

The fifth article is written by the South African historian A. du Toit, who completed an internship at Yale University under the guidance of L. Thompson, who emigrated from South Africa in protest against the reactionary policies of the ruling elite. The article is called " No chosen nations. The myth of the Calvinist origin of African nationalism and racist ideology." Based on the analysis of extensive literature, the author refutes the established opinion that the roots of extreme nationalism and racism of Afrikaners go back centuries and are allegedly caused by a Protestant system of values (p. 924). The author proves that the "Calvinist paradigm" with its main ideological stereotypes borrowed from the Bible ("the chosen people", "divine destiny", "the promised land") is of late origin and was absent in the public consciousness of the Boers until the middle of the XIX century (p.928).

A. du Toit criticizes the main concepts of Afrikaner historiography of the late 19th and 20th centuries and holds it responsible for creating and spreading social myths that justify racism, apartheid, and extreme Afrikaner nationalism. By politicizing history, the leading elite of South Africa constructs false concepts that are used as the ideological and theoretical basis for their reactionary domestic and foreign policies (p.952). The author's views fit into the bourgeois-liberal current of modern South African historiography, which criticizes the most odious aspects of the country's political life. This raises the question of the classification of South African historiography: it is usually divided into English-speaking and Afrikaner historiography .19 But the example of A. du Toit and some other Afrikaner historians shows that it is more correct to distinguish between ideological, political and theoretical criteria.

The reviewed articles in the African issue of the American Historical Review cannot, of course, give a complete picture of the study of the history of Afri-

18 Such songs have survived to this day. A weekly magazine published in the capital of Mozambique recently published a page dedicated to resistance songs common among the Xhosa, Zulu and Tsonga peoples (see Cancoes populares de Resistencia. - Domingo, 4.IX.1983, N 49, p. 19).

19 See: Historical Science in the countries of Africa, Moscow, 1979, p. 233.

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ci in the USA. The latest trend, such as the strengthening of the conservative wing of American African studies, presented by publications of the Hoover Center at Stanford University, has been left out, for example. This trend is most clearly manifested in the 5-volume work "Colonialism in Africa" and in the book of the leading Africanists of this center, L. Gayn and P. Dignen 20 . The progressive democratic movement, which continues the best traditions of the outstanding Africanists of the United States, was also not reflected in the Magazine's pages. Dubois and C. Woodson. Nevertheless, the published articles allow us to draw a conclusion that characterizes the modern American bourgeois historiography of African history: improved research techniques, an abundance and variety of sources, long-term field work-all this on the basis of bourgeois methodology gives very poor theoretical results.

20 Colonialism in Africa, 1870 - 1960. Vol. 1 - 5. Cambridge. 1969 - 1974; Gann L. H., Duignan P. Africa South of the Sahara: the Challenge to Western Security. Stanford. 1981.

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