A Companion to African History by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated
Published: 2018-10-01T00:00:00+00:00

Sources

For much of the precolonial and colonial years, historians of refugees draw on sources similar to those of other historians of Africa: traveler accounts, colonial and missionary archives, interviews. Oral histories collected by previous scholars reveal much about refuge seeking, although few of these have been made widely available. The growth of humanitarian and nongovernmental organizations in the postcolonial years meant the proliferation of written sources, although access to them may be limited and may require travel to a number of different NGO headquarters. Oxford University’s Refugee Studies Centre and the Refugee Council Archive at the University of East London each has collections of published and unpublished material on refugee history, mostly dating from the 1970s. Many UNHCR publications are readily available online,11 although they must of course be approached critically (Crisp 1999).

As we reach the 1970s and 1980s, the availability of refugee voices increases dramatically. Interviews with former refuge seekers and their hosts provide critical material to complement that produced by governments and NGOs, as Rosenthal (2015) and Williams (2015) have shown. Interviews with refugees, especially those who have been encamped for decades, are potentially invaluable in the writing of, for example, the life history of a refugee camp. The ethics of such research, however, are delicate (Mackenzie, McDowell, and Pittaway 2007). For scholars based in Europe, North America, and Australia, communities of “resettled refugees” may be excellent sources; many have an online presence and community and cultural centers (Besteman 2016). Refugees also produce their own written records. A genre of refugee memoirs and biographies has emerged that provide a welcome, if complicated and mediated, source for scholars and students alike (Dau 2007; Eggers 2006; Deng, Deng, and Ajak, 2005; Umutesi 2004; Janzen and Janzen 2000: ch. 1). Qaabatu Boru and his colleagues have since 2008 published a refugee‐run online newspaper out of Kakuma (https://kanere.org).

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.