2025 Jan Vansina Lecture: The Legacies of Jan Vansina

Jan Vansina was one of the founding fathers of the academic historiography of Africa when he established that oral traditions were a valid historical source from a position of relative power after he realized the hegemony of written text. Toyin Falola asserts that when we turn away from Vansina's central methodological tenets, we turn primarily to the colonial and the postcolonial, we have now totally abandoned the precolonial, the longest and most enduring period in African history.