African History and the Thingly Past: A Yoruba Example

Abstract This study examines the significance of nonhuman actors in writing African history. It asks why things and animals are at the margin of African history. It probes how the intersection of presence and absence manifests in things, and how this can aid historians’ imagination of the past. Finally, it seeks to know how the recognition and integration of things in the historical narrative can help understand the unaccounted past. The article draws from the Yoruba visual and verbal arts, particularly the oriki and Ifa corpus to argue that “things” are important historical sources that are methodologically useful and theoretically relevant.