Long-standing prejudice against particularly black Africans has meant that until recently African history writing was largely dictated by Eurocentric or outright racist scholarship. African history has been a challenge for researchers due to the scarcity of written sources in large parts of Sub-Saharan Africa, and also because of conflicting opinions on what is and is not African. Scholarly techniques such as the recording of oral history, historical linguistics, archeology and genetics (to trace the movement of peoples) have been crucial to writing the history of many regions that in the past often have been dismissed as lacking a meaningful history altogether.…
