Name Jan Vansina Role Historian | Doctoral students David Newbury | |
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Born 14 September 1929 (age 94)
Antwerp, Belgium ( 1929-09-14 ) Education Catholic University of Leuven (1957) Awards Guggenheim Fellowship for Social Sciences, US & Canada Books Oral tradition as history, Paths in the rainforests, Living with Africa, Being Colonized: The Kuba, Kingdoms of the savanna | ||
A road from lubumbashi jan vansina
Jan Vansina (14 September 1929 – 8 February 2017) was a Belgian historian and anthropologist regarded as an authority on the history of Central Africa. He was a major innovator in the historical methodology of oral history. As a professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, he taught several generations of students and, according to a biographer, "set the pace in African historical studies from the 1950s into the 1990s."
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Biography
Vansina was first trained as a medievalist and ethnographer but became known as one of the most prominent Africanist scholars. In his work, he focused on the history of African societies prior to European contact, and is widely regarded as the foremost authority on the history of the peoples of Central Africa. He published widely on the subject, including a landmark text on the factual interpretation oral history. On Vansina, historian David Beach writes, "In 1985, Jan Vansina's Oral Tradition as History provided a worldwide theoretical framework on oral tradition that rendered nearly all of its predecessors obsolete."
Vansina obtained his doctorate in history from the Catholic University of Leuven in 1957. After his retirement, he became a professor emeritus at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and lived in Madison, Wisconsin.
Vansina assisted Alex Haley (the author of the 1976 novel Roots: The Saga of an American Family) in deciphering several African words that had been handed down from Haley's ancestors, determining that they were of Mandinka origin.