The study of humanity and all the aspect which deals with human understanding across all cultures as well as ethnicities is referred to anthropology.  It can also be defined as the study of human beings and how they relate to the world around them. It discusses the human physical, social and cultural evolution. The term anthropology is derived from the Greek word “ Anthropos”  which means the science of man.  It started in the field where naturalists searching for fossils stayed together with the traditional people of Africa, trying to study them while searching for ancient artifacts, examining and understand the society which had used them. Anthropology is mostly interchanged with the history which often views events from the past through a modern world view. An anthropologist, a person who studies the behavior of people over time or society uses scientific method or empirical method to carry out their work. They do so through a systematic approach whereby the start and formulating a hypothesis or a scientific guess about the origin of man, test the said hypothesis by searching for the human fossils. Once they get the fossils, their study it then collects necessary data by taking a look at more samples, comes up with an explanation and support it using theory and later publish the result of their study. An anthropologist work with numerous people from other related filed. I order to carry out his research s/he must interact with the people in the community under study.

Anthropology is divided into several subsections namely: cultural anthropology, archeology, physical anthropology, and linguistic anthropology.  1) Cultural anthropology is the study of living cultures humanity, their infrastructures, institutions and how they view the world at large. It also includes studying the people’s race, gender, class, kinship, their meal and mode of feeding, the naming of children and many other aspects of the society. The anthropologist of culture mostly works in hand with psychologists, sociologists, historians, the political scientist as well as economists. 2) Archeology, on the other hand, is the study of human artifacts.  It is mostly related history. It takes a look at anything created by human being in the past examples the temples, recreation sites, and other social and personal artifacts. 3) Linguistic is the study of the development of language as well as the relationship. 4)  physical anthropology is the study of the human organism. It seeks to study the evolution of man, his remains, forensics, and ancient diseases also known as Paleopathology.

The study and knowledge of the African people, their society an culture from the colonial era till date is the African anthropology. However, modern anthropology has developed a little later. The origin of Africans can be traced from back in the year 1900 and in the year 1927 in the united states and great Britain respectively when some people who had been trained In new canons of explanations and understanding as well as practice in the of extended fieldwork were awarded their doctorates. The study of African society and cultures started in the late 1920s, after Bronislaw Malinowski an A.R Radcliffe-Brown was awarded Ph.D. in British anthropology and started their fieldwork on the African culture and societies. After the world war 11, Another American anthropologist supported by ford foundation also began ethnographic research in Africa. However, the anthropologist of Africa changed considerably due to African attaining her independence from her colonizers, postmodernism, numerous intellectual upheavals and the reorientation of world scholarships as a result of the emergence of women movement.

Over the decade’s anthropologist have divided the African history into tripartite of precolonial, colonial and postcolonial periods. It was entangled to the establishment of the colonial period. That is anthropology in Africa attracted interest after the European shown interest on Africa.  The interest and priorities of the colonial authority paved the way and the availability of ethnographic materials in a significant way.  Other than colonialism, anthropologists have other facts to study such as their culture, race, their buildings, temples, and their food. The ethnographic study which takes a keen study of the tribal customs of the African people, as well as the structures by the anthropologist, formed the basis which helped maintain the colonial authority and accounts for the political and legal system in Africa. It also became the foundation of techniques of governance. The missionary society in Africa was also responsible for the ethnographic study, and they were among the first group of people to produce monographs for specific ethnic group in Africa. For there to be an effective transition of the African culture and religion practice to Christianity, it was essential to understand the African culture in details.  The ethnographies gathered by the missionaries were mostly contained in papers, memoirs as well as other correspondent materials. These materials have lots of information on African culture such as their languages, culture and the social lives of the people they were teaching. Other than these ethnographers, there were also other professionals such as the linguists, the assistance of the African researchers who made a remarkable contribution in shaping the knowledge and in the field work, the colonial officers who interacted with the people, medical staffs and the teachers.

Anthropology practice in Africa conducted during the colonial period had a significant impact on the development of the discipline and the creation of new schools of intellectuals as well as paradigms. Research carried out in the late nineteenth century and the early twentieth century shaped the African past gave a notation that earlier stages of development of man started in Africa.  Both scholars and colonial officers held to this evolution view.  They believed that people around the world could be ranked from a single evolutionary hierarchy in regards to their relative complexity and sophistication of their material culture and their political systems. The evolution view was however challenged by the anthropologist such as Radcliffe-brown and Malinowski who emphasized mostly on culture as internally logical, functional integrated and self-contained.

Evans-Pritchard one of the earliest anthropologist in Africa, on his research in 1930, on Azande and Nuer structural functionalism concluded that Africa did not have a history and its tribes were the hermetic system. The Establishment and development of anthropology in Africa were influenced by the availability of scholarships within the settings of institutions as well as empirical specificities of different fields. The field sites for the anthropology in colonial Africa mostly followed the flag to a large extent. As a result, there was a different approach to studying Africa regarding the national anthropological and ethnological.  The different approaches led to the extension of the research to different regions in Africa leading to the development of different tropes such as the secret societies in West Africa and dined kinships in British central Africa.

The rise of social history and the validation of oral historical methods and the emergence of historical ethnography, African history have been made on the field work rather than on the archives. This study aimed at studying the people themselves by participating into the day to day lives of the people in the community under investigation. The method mostly used by the anthropologist was the participant observational method, this method had its own advantages since by one interacting with the traditional community they were able to acquire and intensive knowledge. They were also able to develop personal relationships with their informants, learn the language of the people and also participate in the social lives of the people. This method, however, had its own disadvantages in that it lacked a systematic rigor. Additionally, this method lacked an element of a true participant.

The role of anthropology in African history.

Anthropology played a significant role in the history of the African community. Cultural anthropology attempts to understand and explain the view of the subject or perspective. It utilizes statistical demographic and statistical demographic to compose theories. It is meant to study the religious, economic, political, social, environmental and cultural behaviors of the people. Anthropology also allows people to understand the African social culture mostly by the Europeans who had a different culture and thus eliminating their negativity on Africans such racism.  It has been the white a chance to study other non-whites societies.

Challenges faced by the anthropologist in Africa

Difficulty in gaining access.  An anthropologist by the name Annie who was researching the Bakongo people of Central Africa claimed that it was so challenging to get reliable information. She had to convince the people that the research was very crucial for their society and thus they had to participate. Building a relationship with the people is also tricky and most of them do not trust outsiders. Others community especially in west Africa feared trusting outsiders as they feared they would victimize them and holding the information. Other choose to give wrong answers hindering the anthropologist in discovering the truth.

Another challenge is unfamiliar concepts or being lost in the transition. People from different cultural communities see reality and life at different perspectives. Example, people from the western communities views every individual as unique, and they encourage that every person unique expression be differentiated from others, while those in the eastern mostly tend to associate themselves with a particular group.

Racism is one of the significant challenges facing anthropology at large. People mostly relate anthropologist to the colonizers especially during the colonial period, and people feared that by giving out the information about their past would betray them to their colonizers.

In conclusion, anthropologist plays an essential role in the development process and is crucial to development as well. In Africa, there are many repositories where collection from the early ethnologists, folklorists, and linguistics housed and act as a source of historical, ethnographic materials. An example is a collection by Bleek-Lloyd Archive which consists of ethnographic materials gathered in the 1870s on mythology, kingship hunting and folklore. The missionaries in the colonial people also recorded the customs, language and the tradition of the African society and this information is found in the archives of the church missionary society.  Thus anthropology plays a significant role in African society.

 
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