By Toyin Falola
Where the Road Becomes an Archive
I carry more than a destination,
I carry the memory of a historian across the road,
I carry questions that have outlived the man who asked them,
I carry Africa’s unfinished conversation with its past,
And I carry Ogot’s footprints toward the lake.
I am on my way to Kisumu.
Sometimes your journey begins long before you take your first step. There are destinations which are imagined long before visiting them, places which are initially known to one not in terms of firsthand experience but rather from stories and writings, photographs and discussions, and memories of those who have already walked those paths. This is exactly how Kisumu is to me.
On my way there, I am not only going to a destination, but I am also going to history, memory, and the legacy in the mind of a person whose study changed the way Africa looks at its own past. The Department of History, Archaeology and Political Studies, Kenyatta University, together with CODESRIA, will be organizing an International Memorial Conference from 21st to 23rd of September 2026 in honor of the late Professor Bethwell Allan Ogot. The conference will take place at Tom Mboya Labor College, Kisumu City County, themed: “The Indelible Footprints of B.A. Ogot on the Sands of Time: History, Method and Knowledge Production in Africa.”
As I head towards Kisumu, I realize that footprints are not usually something left behind. Footprints show movement. They signal that somebody was here before, and they compel us to ask who that person was, where he had been before coming here, what he had carried in, and how he affected the things around him. This is probably the way we should understand the heritage of Ogot. He is no longer physically present to roam around Kisumu, enter lecture halls, and argue with young historians about the understanding of the African past.
Nevertheless, his intellectual presence lives on in books, lecture halls, the minds of students, historical disputes, and, above all, in questions troubling African intellectuals. There is something special about the relationship that historians share with death. This is because of historians’ work: they converse with the dead from many years ago. When historians go to archives, they search for the voice of a person who died many years ago. Historians build society from bits and pieces; they examine documents made by hands that died decades ago.
Over time, Kisumu has played an important role in connecting communities and shaping the economies, societies, and cultures of East Africa. The land surrounding Kisumu has a history that existed long before the colonial administration and cannot be fully understood within the confines of the lines drawn later. Before these lines were drawn, communities interacted across the region through migration, trade, intermarriage, and exchange. The railway, colonial administration and modern urban infrastructure transformed Kisumu, but they did not create its history. This distinction is central to understanding the intellectual importance of African historians such as Ogot. Colonial knowledge systems frequently gave the impression that African history became visible only when Europeans encountered, recorded, or classified it. What was not recorded in European archives did not seem to exist. While oral tradition was treated with skepticism, colonial sources were accorded far more credibility than they deserved, especially regarding the writers’ perspectives.
Ogot was among the African intellectuals who challenged this hierarchy through credible academic research. He was part of the wider trend in African historiography: that African societies were not just the objects of history but also its makers, interpreters, and guardians. The histories of African societies could not be reconstructed solely from colonial archives. Oral tradition, archaeology, linguistics, genealogy, anthropology, material culture, and community memory all help reconstruct them when subjected to critical analysis. This was more than a methodological adjustment; it was an intellectual and epistemological intervention. It challenged the assumption that Africa could supply the raw material of history while theoretical knowledge had to be produced elsewhere. It questioned the hierarchy that positioned European intellectual centers as producers of concepts and theories while reducing Africa to a source of data and examples. Ogot and other pioneering African historians showed that African historical experiences could generate questions, interpretations, and theoretical insights that contribute to broader understandings of human societies.
This is why the Kisumu conference theme is particularly significant. The reference to Ogot’s “indelible footprints” is not simply a celebration of a distinguished scholar. It raises a fundamental question about what remains after a scholar has passed on. What survives of a historian? Is it the books? The institutions? The students? The arguments? The methods? Or is it the questions that continue to challenge subsequent generations? When a historian dies, the work does not necessarily become silent.
In many cases, the text itself begins to answer back more loudly. It is the job of the historian to communicate all his life with people who have been dead for a long time. He goes into the archives to find the voices of those who died decades ago. He builds societies from fragments, questions texts written by people no longer alive, and listens to oral tradition. Ogot’s passing therefore does not end his intellectual journey. His body of work has been instrumental in shaping discussion about the history of Kenya, East Africa and Africa generally. His work remains relevant to debates on historiography, oral tradition, nationalism, identity, knowledge, and the decolonization of scholarship. Ogot’s intellectual legacy is also evident in the scholars and students who encountered his ideas and carried them forward.
In journeying to Kisumu, I am more aware that the road itself may turn out to be an archive, if only we know how to decode it. A village is not only a group of houses. It may hold many generations of migration, family stories, political conflict, marriages, alliances, and memories. The market is not simply a site of exchange of products. It has preserved much more of the social and economic relations that existed long before the state. A family name carries the story of migration, and a landscape can preserve traces of events never recorded in official documents. Archives are preserved in buildings, carefully organized in boxes, shelves, and digital repositories. However, some archives are housed in human beings themselves. These archives can be found within the memories of elderly persons, in language, songs, genealogy, ritual, places, stories, gravesites, and community traditions. The problem that has persisted in African historiography is how to engage with various kinds of sources without falling into the trap colonialists set by treating written sources as the only valid kind. Every society negotiates with memory and forgetting; some are natural, but some are political. Governments may forget uncomfortable episodes in national history. Victors may minimize the violence that produced their victories. Nations may construct narratives that make their histories more convenient. Communities may preserve some memories while allowing others to disappear.
The historian’s responsibility, therefore, is not simply to accumulate facts. It is also to ask difficult questions about absence, power, and representation. Who is missing from the story? Whose voice was silenced? Whose knowledge was dismissed? Who named a place before it acquired its official name? Whose labor contributed to the prosperity that later generations inherited? What happened before the archive began speaking? Ogot’s legacy speaks directly to these questions. His contribution was not limited to writing historical texts. He also helped develop scholarly communities and institutions. This institutional aspect of his work matters because research is not solely a matter of individual success. The university, the department, the journal, the association, the conference, and the network constitute the milieu that allows for knowledge to be generated, contested, and disseminated. The scholar writes a book; the teacher makes students. An institution-builder creates possibilities for generations yet to come.
Many students who enter established university departments today may never know who struggled to create those departments. Researchers may inherit journals and scholarly networks without knowing who fought to establish them. Academic communities can appear permanent even though earlier generations built them through labor, vision, and persistence. Those institutional structures are also part of a scholar’s footprint. In this context, the proposed revival of the Historical Association of Kenya becomes an important dimension of the Kisumu gathering. The association is an important platform for organizing and connecting Kenya’s historians, and its possible revival gives the memorial conference a purpose that extends beyond commemoration. It suggests that remembering Ogot should also involve rebuilding and strengthening the intellectual institutions through which historians engage one another and contribute to public life.
A memorial, after all, should not become merely a museum of praise. It should become a space for questions. To honor Ogot meaningfully is not simply to declare that he was a great historian. An intellectual legacy does not survive because it is insulated from critique but because it survives long enough to inspire new questions. This is true in an era when the challenge before African scholars is decolonization, intellectual autonomy, and the creation of knowledge. The challenge is not to dismiss all ideas which emerge outside Africa or glorify those which emerge within. It is to be intellectually liberated enough to judge knowledge by its own merit and to understand that African societies can produce ideas, theories, methodologies, and interpretations based on their own history. That is one of the most enduring lessons associated with the generation of historians to which Ogot belonged.
I am attending a memorial, but I am also going to a conversation about the future. I am going to meet historians who are thinking about history itself: its methods, its evidence, its responsibilities and its possibilities. I am going to a city whose historical identity is inseparable from movement, exchange and memory. I am going towards the lake, and towards the intellectual footprints of Bethwell Allan Ogot. Something is fitting about remembering a historian beside water. Water recognizes no boundaries that we human beings create for ourselves. The waters of Nam Lolwe have witnessed many different eras of fishermen, traders, migrants, and travelers. They have witnessed the rise and fall of different political regimes, the formation and transformation of borders, the emergence of cities and new communities. But political administrations will come and go, borders will shift, names will change, while the lake remains. We see only what lies on the water’s surface right now. Underneath the water, however, lies a history of people who have been forgotten. The historian lowers an imperfect intellectual net into those depths, searching for evidence and meaning.
Ogot spent a lifetime lowering that net into the waters of African history. Now another generation must decide what to do with what he helped us recover. That, perhaps, is the deeper meaning of this journey. I am not simply traveling towards a city where scholars will gather to remember a distinguished historian. I am traveling toward an encounter with a continuing intellectual responsibility: the responsibility to remember Africa critically, to question inherited narratives, and to ensure that the production of knowledge about the continent remains open to African voices, experiences, and intellectual traditions. The road to Kisumu is therefore becoming more than a route to a destination. It is becoming a metaphor for historical inquiry itself. I am on my way to Kisumu—to memory, to history, to the lake and to a gathering of scholars asking what African history has been, what it has become and what it might yet be. Somewhere between the written archive and the spoken word, between the living and the ancestors, between the land and the immense waters of Nam Lolwe, Bethwell Allan Ogot’s intellectual presence will undoubtedly remain because the final death of a scholar does not occur when the heart stops beating. It occurs when the questions stop. Ogot’s questions have not stopped.
