Kenneth Onwuka Dike as an Atlantic Historian: An Alternative History of the Formative Years of African Historiography

Resumen

This article reinterprets Trade and Politics in the Niger Delta (1956), one of the major works by the African historian Ken­neth Onwuka Dike, not as a foundational nationalist historical production, but as part of an alternative Atlantic historiogra­phy from a non-Western perspective. Through a reconstruc­tion of the library mobilized in Dike’s book, the study maps a trans-imperial network that spans Black Atlantic intellectual production, infrastructures of historical training, research, com­munication and archival public policy, and the shifting bound­aries of the historical profession in the first half of the twentieth century. Special attention is given to the institutional develop­ment of imperial/colonial history as a subfield, the emergence of new social actors in the historical guild in order to reveal the multiple layers of Dike’s intervention. The result is a reframing of Dike as an Atlantic historian whose work invites us to re­think the historiographical geographies of decolonization and the plural genealogies of African historical writing.