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Kuma Malinke historiography: Sundiata Keita to Almamy Samori Toure, by Nubia Kai, Lanham, Lexington Books, 2014, 341 pp., $105.00 (cloth), ISBN 9870739182680.
Works of historiography generally are not characterized as "scintillating". Yet, Nubia Kai has produced a work that is fascinating, sometimes exciting, and possibly - just possibly - somewhat controversial. Kuma Malinke Historiography is a work of value to anyone dedicated to the craft of doing history - any history.
Kuma Malinke Historiography does several things from both the methodological and theoretical standpoints. Methodologically, it revisits the legitimacy and prominence of oral history and oral data collection made famous in the work of Jan Vansina and his successors. By extension Kai's work also lends itself to the current attention being given to the study of "material culture" in historical analyses. Kai posits, implicitly, that all cultural production and its artefacts - including poetry, music, folklore, literature, and myth - can be mined for historical meaning. The text reminds us that...