ASSIGNED VIEWING: Jan Vansina Talks History


Don't be alarmed by the French, the video is mostly in English 


Jan Vansina was one of African history's legends - a rare example of a scholar who not only had a hand in shaping the development of an entire field but remained nimble enough to reassess that influence long after he had become a living institution. More than once, he'd write the book on a topic (working with oral records, reconstructing deep histories in Equatorial Africa, etc), tearing apart centuries of colonial scholarship in the process, and then proceed to blow up the new consensus that arose around his own work with another book a decade or so later. Vansina did this at least three different times - a historian's historian. He's been on my mind a lot recently, since I'm re-reading one of his books for inspirational purposes as I work on a tabletop thing based heavily on his work, and I thought it would be fun to introduce the man here in all his accented Belgian glory. 

It's such a joy to see his face light up when talking about surprising turns in the eastward migration of Bantu-speakers or the virtues of fieldwork. This recording was made less than a year before his death and he was still on the cutting edge of his field, inhaling new research and debating its implications like a grad kid. There's an effortless mastery to the flow of Vansina's conversation - I feel it most strongly in the way he'll off-handedly mentions insights linking different bodies of work or theories about future developments, any number of which (from experience) could drive the entire early career of a fledgling historian. 

The part that I think might be the most relevant to folks in this hobby is around the 22 minute mark - where he starts discussing the relevance of academic history in the context of African experiences - but if you have an hour to kill and interest in early African history/linguistics, there's worse ways to spend it than watching the whole thing. 

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